Bed for the King's Daughter
Description
A groundbreaking collection of experimental short fiction by award-winning Syrian author and Booker International Prize for Arabic Fiction nominee Shahla Ujayli, A Bed for the King's Daughter uses surrealism and irony to examine such themes as women's agency, the decline of collective life and imagination under modernity, and the effects of social and political corruption on daily life. In "The Memoir of Cinderella's Shoes," Cinderella uses her famous glass slipper as a weapon in order to take justice into her own hands. In "Tell Me About Surrealism," an art history professor's writing assignment reveals the slipperiness of storytelling, and in "Merry Christmas," the realities of apartheid interfere with one family's celebration. Through twenty-two short stories, Ujayli animates--with brevity and inventiveness--themes relevant to both the particularities of life in the Arab world and life outside it.
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About the Author
Shahla Ujayli is a Syrian writer, born in 1976. She holds a doctorate in Modern Arabic Literature and Cultural Studies from Aleppo University in Syria and currently teaches Modern Arabic Literature at the University of Aleppo and the American University in Madaba, Jordan. She is the author of a short-story collection entitled The Mashrabiyya (2005) and two novels: The Cat's Eye (2006), which won the Jordan State Award for Literature in 2009, and Persian Carpet (2013).
She has also published a number of critical studies, including The Syrian Novel: Experimentalism and Theoretical Categories (2009), Cultural Particularity in the Arabic Novel (2011) and Mirror of Strangeness: Articles on Cultural Criticism (2006). In 2017, she won the Al Multaqa Prize for her short-story collection The Bed of the King's Daughter.
