Breaking knees

Wry, satirical, and bawdy, Zakaria Tamer's microfiction is always informed by his dark view of humanity and of Syrian society in particular. Through these mordant glimpses of corrupt, fearful lives under a violent dictatorship, it is possible to discern echoes of the storm that has brought Syria to near-disintegration. Unsentimental and brilliantly compressed, these sixty-three stories are the work of a virtuoso. Zakaria Tamer was born in 1931 in Damascus. A former journalist, he has written in a variety of forms, but the genre for which he is best known is al-qissa al-qasira jjiddan , the very short story.