Acknowledgments

This anthology testifies to a collective effort in a number of ways. I am grateful to the writers who were gracious in offering permission for translation and in providing texts, book reviews, and other helpful material. The encouragement of friends and family has been exceptional. I owe thanks to Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon, editor and assistant editor of Banipal, the London-based journal of Arab literature, where several of the translations first appeared. Their enthusiasm for translating Arabic literature has been instrumental in the completion of this anthology. I am also grateful to my friends Herbert Mason and the late H. James Jensen, for reading and commenting on some of the translations, and to my wife, Nawal Nasrallah, who read and commented on all of them. Finally, I extend warm gratitude to Annie Barva for her careful and sensitive editing of the manuscript and to Dino Cavallari for the cover illustration, based on Mayselun Hadi’s story “Her Realm of the Real.”