“Supplication”—a short story by Hisham Bustani
In Hisham Bustani’s new short story, one man’s religious nightmare brings him face to face with an unlikely public intellectual of his day.
Thoraya El-Rayyes
Hisham Bustani (b. Amman, 1975) is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. Much of his work revolves around issues related to social and political change, particularly the dystopian experience of post-colonial modernity in the Arab world. Critics have described his writing as “bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century,” and “[he] belongs to an angry new Arab generation. Indeed, he is at the forefront of this generation – combining an unbounded modernist literary sensibility with a vision for total change…His anger extends to encompass everything, including literary conventions.” His work has been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. His fiction has been collected in such anthologies as The Best Asian Short Stories; The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds; The Radiance of the Short Story: Fiction From Around the Globe, and Influence and Confluence – East and West: A Global Anthology on the Short Story. Bustani’s story collection The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (trans. Maia Tabet) was published in 2022 by Mason Jar Press. He tweets @H_Bustani.
Thoraya El-Rayyes is a writer, award-winning literary translator, and political economist based in London, England. Her translations of contemporary Arab literature have appeared in publications including the Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, World Literature Today, and Words Without Borders, among others.