On the Literature of Modern Arabia

This is an excellent 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. The poems were good, but the short stories were outstanding, and the Yemeni and Saudi writers in particular hit hard, perhaps because of the sheer number of people in those two countries relative to the rest of the Peninsula; one Yemeni story, following some characters on a bus trip across the country, was especially good. I don’t know of another collection that anthologizes the Arabian Peninsula quite like this. Very few of these authors will be recognizable even to Arab readers — the Peninsula tends to get far less respect for its recent literary heritage than places like Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, or Morocco — and yet most of the oldest samples of Arabic literature come from the Peninsula. For anyone interested in modern Arabic literature, it’s essential.