Issue 11 of The Common Mag is dedicated to new fiction from across the Arab world. The following stories are among the 24 featured in the issue. There will be a celebration of the issue, and the magazine, on May 19th at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, 6pm to 9pm, in New York.

On his last visit to Cairo, the German translator Hartmut Fähndrich was despondent about the lack of interest in contemporary Arabic writing, and he offered this interesting explanation of Western reluctance to engage with Arabic literature: “I think [readers] fear that it will destroy The Thousand and One Nights image they have in their minds.” One might argue about the number of potential German book buyers who have the timeless classic lodged in their minds, but even those who do need not worry. No one writing today could possibly live up to the lack of sophistication, unadorned sensuality, and aimless fantasizing found in The Thousand and One Nights.

Another possible reason for Western lack of interest in Arabic literature is the perception that, as a culturally foreign backwater, economically and intellectually inferior, the Arab world can solicit only a political or anthropological interest, not a purely literary one. Books that do not pander to this preconception by presenting an exoticized or oversimplified pro-democracy perspective on Arab life are therefore ignored. Of course we can assert that that contemporary Arabs are not really all that different from their Western counterparts. We can also decry the treatment of literature as a research aid. But the truth is that, for many in the West, fiction has functioned as an enjoyable way into the political and social complexities behind all that disturbing news from the Middle East.

–Youssef Rahka (read his full introductory essay here)

“Rhythmic Exercise” by Mohamed Makhzangi, translated by Yasmeen Hanoosh

“With one bullet the sniper stifled all the music in the chests of the five family members.”