Author: Elias Jahshan
Publisher: Saqi
Paperback
Burley Fisher Books of the Year 2025
Elena says... I keep coming back to this moving collection of queer stories in and connected to the Arab world because it revels in the absurd contradictions between expectation/norms/ideology and lived experiences. I loved learning about Beirut’s Club Arak party collective, the politics of adoption customs in Sudan, the pressures of procreation rooted in idiomatic Arabic dialects and alternative futurities of familial/societal organisation. Through a belly-dancing robot, a letter to a baby and an extralegal Hajji’s account, Elias Jahshan’s second anthology of queer Arab writings seriously and playfully subverts today’s reductive and divisive identity politics.