Contributors

Osama Alomar
Contributor History

Biography
Syrian writer Osama Alomar is a prominent practitioner of the Arabic “very short story” (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan). Previous English translations of his work have appeared in NOON, and he has published three fiction collections in Arabic: Ayuha al-insaan (O Man), Rabtat Lisaan (Tongue Tie) , and Jami’ al-huquq ghayr mahfuza (All Rights Not Reserved) , as well as one volume of poetry, Qaala insaan al’ asir al hadith (Man Said the Modern World). The 2007 winner of Egypt’s Najlaa Muharam Short Story Contest, his work is regularly heard on the BBC Arabic Service and he is a regular contributor to various newspapers and journals in Syria and the Arab community, including Tishrin, an-Nur, Spot Light, al-Halil, Adab wa Naqd, and al-Ghad

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

July 24, 2024
On Valentine’s Day, Milo strings a horse-shaped piñata from the ceiling light in our living room, and I walk by twice before noticing it swaying there. The light is off and the horse is dark, but I am not unobservant. Part of me accepts a horse swinging in my periphery. Milo makes up a real reason for me to go back down the hall and, when I look for the space heater, I find the horse hanging. He dangles from a yellow jump rope, and I am so happy to see him in my house. Milo hands me the stick. “You need,” he says, “to kill a horse.”
 
July 17, 2024
There is the man on the moon. Go to him. Get bread from him, drink his water. Take your dog, Blue to him. Take your mother. She is skiing outside around the house. Stop her, tell her that Blue is going also. Take the gander, Henry. He is short in the legs. Leave me Iris. I have seen her eat feed in a pattern.
 
July 10, 2024
Marcie decided on Vertigo because she’d recently encountered several texts in quick succession that made extensive reference to it: Chris Marker’s time travel film told in still images, La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s unlikely Hollywood adaptation, 12 Monkeys, and a story by Bennett Sims called “White Dialogues” about an embittered academic seething in an auditorium during a lecture being given by the hot new thing in Hitchcock studies. The coincidence made her feel involved with the film, and vice versa, in a way that evades more specific description.