Merchant of stories

The texts of this collection are different from Hassan Abdel Mawjoud's previous stories, some of which are dozens of pages long. Heroism here is for intensity and brevity, for silence, not speech. They are wonderful stories of innocence, death, loss, pain, hunger, and finding humanity even in evil. It is an abundance of tenderness and cruelty, sarcasm and humor, in amazing writing that Hassan Abdel Mawjoud has mastered. In "e;The Merchant of Stories"e;, Hassan Abdel Mawjoud excels at generating strangeness from the simplest daily details, and at eliminating the distance between the original and the image, between truth and illusion, and between tragedy and comedy. But perhaps the word "e;tragedy"e; is not consistent with the world of these stories. Written with cunning and evasion, where pain and sorrow are often mixed with humor or childish innocence. Mansoura Ezz El-Din has always believed that beautiful literature can come in thousands of words in the manner of Homer, or in the fewest words in the manner of Basho, and I learned that reading a single haiku might require as much effort as the Iliad. This book by Hassan Abdel Mawjoud confirmed for me what I believed in and what I learned. Ahmed Shafi'i