Wry, satirical, and bawdy, Zakaria Tamer's microfiction is always
informed by his dark view of humanity and of Syrian society in
particular. Through these mordant glimpses of corrupt, fearful lives
under a violent dictatorship, it is possible to discern echoes of the
storm that has brought Syria to near-disintegration.
Unsentimental and brilliantly compressed, these sixty-three stories are
the work of a virtuoso.
Zakaria Tamer was born in 1931 in Damascus. A former journalist, he
has written in a variety of forms, but the genre for which he is best
known is al-qissa al-qasira jjiddan, the very short story.