Fullblood Arabian

24 February 2014

Osama Alomar (Author), C. J. Collins (Translator)

With a Preface by Lydia Davis

Description

A New Directions Poetry Pamphlet by one of the most well-respected Arabic poets writing today, with an introduction by Lydia Davis

A prominent practitioner of the Arabic “very short story” (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomar’s poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad’s police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first publication of Alomar’s strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion using striking imagery and effervescent language.

Reviews

"Marvellous compressions." — John Madera, Big Other

"In Alomar''s stories [...] fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency" — Lydia Davis, The New Yorker

"The stories'' distinctive flavour comes from Alomar''s masterful shifts of character perspective within extremely tight parameters […] The book is full of these moments which trip you up, swing bluntly from one psyche to another, rapidly decelerate time and play with scale, all of it exposing the delicate balance of our presumptions and allegiances; the small dictatorships that we foster second by second." — Emma Jacobs, Asymptote Blog

"[His stories] convey a raw combination of beauty and resignation, as if the two were created to reside under the same roof, hope and hurt at one […] Alomar is a man of small but universally affecting insights." — The American

Also By: Osama Alomar

Poetry Pamphlets 1-12 (Boxed Set)
Osama Alomar, Lydia Davis, Hilda Doolittle, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Forrest Gander, Oliverio Girondo, Susan Howe, Sylvia Legris, Bernadette Mayer, Dunya Mikhail, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nathaniel Tarn, Eliot Weinberger
Paperback, 2015
Collections 1-12 in New Directions' Poetry Pamphlet series

Also By: Lydia Davis

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New Directions, Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Sylvia Legris
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Brilliantly translated by Lydia Davis, here are Proust’s tormented, touching, and often very funny letters to his noisy neighbor.
Looking at Pictures
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A special side of Robert Walser: his essays on art