Banipal 49 – A Cornucopia of Short Stories
Issue 49 of Banipal focused on Short Stories and had an impressive collection of stories, from the fantastic, to the experimental to mainstream. Many of them were very good and I was impressed with the stylistic range of story telling. Jokha Al-Harthi’s On the Wooden Park Bench…We Sat was impressive, telling a simple story of a romance played out on a park bench. Salima Salih’s The Body was a haunting and dark story about a man who goes to morgue to find his dead son, and finding he isn’t dead enters a bureaucratic nightmare. Anis Afafai’s Moroccan Dead Transfer Company was delightfully fantastic, playing with reality and dream at the same time. In all of the stories there was an inventiveness that made many of the stories quite different from each other, both in theme and style. There is no over arching take away from the collection, other than there are some great voices out there that I would have liked to read more of. In most cases their works are not translated into English and this is your only chance to read from these ±20 authors. I would have liked a few more stories from women. Otherwise this edition was quite enjoyable.
