Set in the Syrian neighborhood of al-Qaweyq, Sour Grapes is a collection of fifty-nine wry, satirical short stories loosely connected by a cast of rotating characters living at society's margins. Tamer captures their everyday lives, weaving the attendant cruelties and ironies of living under an oppressive regime with the residents' irreverence and small acts of defiance. Inspired by the heroines of Arab mythology, the women of al-Qaweyq navigate the patriarchal community with brash confidence and dark humor while the younger generation of children inherit a bitter cynicism from their fathers. Evoking under-ripened and immature fruit, the collection's title serves as a bittersweet metaphor for a world that possesses the seeds of change but is unprepared for the harvest. Considered a master of the short story, Zakaria Tamer is one of the Arab world's most prominent and widely read writers. Columbu and Capallera's fluid translation gives English readers access to Tamer's original and provocative voice.

Sour Grapes (Middle East Literature In Translation)

Literature & Fiction

TAMER, ZAKARIA

Humor & Satire

Syracuse University Press

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.

Breaking Knees

Short Stories & Anthologies

Periscope

ArabLit Quarterly: Winter 2020: DREAMS

Hussein, Hadiya

Lynx Qualey, Marcia

Fadl, Belal

El Shabrawy, Nada

al-Alawi, Maqbul

Elmougy, Sahar

Faris al-Shidyaq, Ahmad

World Literature

Independently published

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Books by TAMER, ZAKARIA