Featured Book
By Aziz Hakimi
Kabul Blues is a short story collection by Aziz Hakimi, whose literary voice has been shaped by decades of living through — and reporting on — one of the world’s most turbulent regions. The stories in Kabul Blues are compact and emotionally precise, drawing on the rhythms of daily Afghan life as it collides with war, displacement, and memory.
Short Stories from the Middle East
It is seven in the evening on a Sunday, the tenth or eleventh of July, and I am still thirsty. There is a smell of wet sulphur and iron filings....
As a family, we've never liked doctors. You could say we have a blood feud with them. The roots of the hatred go back to the night my great-great-grandfather fell...
When the corpse-cleansing ladies brought Mum in and laid her on the slab and pulled back the cloth from her face, Auntie fainted. Nazi, the wife of Gholam the flower...
By Aziz Hakimi
I have been awake for nineteen days straight. I counted the pebbles in the Styrofoam cup this morning before I come to the shore and lie down on this smooth...
By Asef Jahed
‘Except for a few exceptions,’ he said, ‘people enter this world alone and leave it the same way. Do you see? It shows that at heart we’re solitary creatures. We...
By Aziz Hakimi
Gol Alam insisted that Americans’ blood was green. He said his brother had taken him to see the corpse of an American soldier he’d just killed and he, Gol Alam,...