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.