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Book Review: “Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction”
Western readers wanting to learn more about life in what we call the Middle East would benefit from this collection (ed. Jordan Elgrably, City Lights, 2024). Taken together, its short fiction works to humanize those who have been dehumanized by our media for so long.
These stories, written by both established and rising authors, were originally published in The Markaz Review between 2020 and 2023. In his introduction, Elgrably places them in context: they come from what is more aptly named the Center of the World (markaz is Arabic for “center”), which spans from Morocco to Palestine and from Turkey to Afghanistan.
It was in this part of the world, Elgrably reminds us, that Western civilization’s foundational texts — the Bible and Homer’s two epics, among others — were written. Out of ignorance or fear, many of the West’s most vociferous defenders prefer to overlook this, which has led, to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari, to an overcoding not only of the people from the region (whose languages, religions, and cultures are far from monolithic), but also of the name for the region itself.[1]
Stories from the Center of the World chips away at such false (and deadly) notions by depicting life in these areas not as it is portrayed in news reports but how it is…
