The short story has often been claimed — by Egyptian critics in particular — as the great Arabic prose form of the twentieth century. The argument is that the short story's brevity and tonal range matched the political conditions of mid-century Arab life better than the novel's patient social architecture; whether or not you accept the argument, the body of work is real.
Egyptian short fiction begins with Mahmoud Tahir Lashin and Mahmoud Taymur in the 1920s, matures with Yusuf Idris in the 1950s, and continues today in the work of writers like Mohamed Mustagab, Yusuf al-Sharuni, and Salwa Bakr.
In Syria Zakaria Tamer's very short fables; in Palestine Ghassan Kanafani's grim parables of refugee life; in Iraq Hassan Blasim's post-2003 surrealism. The Banipal magazine and the AUC Press anthologies have made many of these stories available in English.
