Description: A groundbreaking collection of experimental short fiction by 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 women's agency and the decline of modern
Brief description: Shahla Ujayli is the author of four novels: The Cat's Eye (2006), which won the Jordan State Award for Literature 2009; Persian Carpet (2012); A Sky Close to Our House (2015), which was IPAF-shortlisted in 2016; and Summer with the Enemy (2018), which was IPAF-shortlisted in 2019. She has also published one other short collection in Arabic, The Latticed Window (2005). The Arabic edition of A Bed for the King's Daughter (2016) won the 2017 Al-Multaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story awarded by the American University in Kuwait.
Review Quotes: How do you sharply round out a story that is headed for a cliff? How do you make the sudden feel inevitable, circumventable, then over, as if all at once? Repeatedly, Ujayli manages, if not to square the circle, then to circle the square and so every square within it.-- "Chicago Review of Books" (1/21/2021 12:00:00 AM)