Master of the Shrine

For Abdullah Khalifa, the act of writing appears to be a transformative artistic stance that brings about broad revelations in the human spirit and consciousness. His ability, as a novelist and short story writer who has written numerous novels and short stories, lies in stepping beyond the surface of political and social life to write about the hidden spiritual and psychological fabric of the heroes of his stories. This means representing the human with the local, and the aesthetic with the social. The structural texture of the stories in this collection lends them a profound human character, emanating from a vision that encapsulates experience, suffering, and privacy into a view of the world as a whole. This leads the reader to immerse himself in contemplation at the turning point of astonishment as he follows the methods of constructing intertwined details in a distinct narrative allure governed by a conscious ability to shape the self, as a meaning of existence, within whose secrets the author delves into stories that he works to uncover, evoking the aesthetics of storytelling in the face of the tyranny of the self.