This is an outstanding collection of poems and short stories (with one play!) from the Arabian peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the Emirates are all represented here.

While the poems in the collection were good, the short stories were outstanding. Yemeni and Saudi writers have particularly hard-hitting stories, which may be due to the sheer number of people living in these two countries w/r/t to the rest of the Peninsula. One Yemeni story, which takes place following some characters on a bus trip across Yemen, was especially good.

I don’t know of any other collection of literature that anthologizes the Arabian Peninsula quite like this one. Very few of the authors here will be recognizable even to Arab readers–the Arabian Peninsula tends to be much less respected for its (recent) literary heritage than places like Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, or Morocco. Of course, most of the oldest samples of Arabic literature are from the Peninsula.

Altogether, it’s a must-read for those interested in modern Arabic literature.