Osama Alomar

Alomar’s work speaks to the power that words can have when they’re constrained, be it by style or by necessity… a master of the form.

Despite their apparent playful wit, Alomar’s deceptively slight short stories have teeth and bite. In spare, accessible prose, one encounters the painful and bitter poetry of exile running like a blood-red thread through this slim but dense collection.

Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories are shrewd and full of intelligence.

In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here in Chicago, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company.

In Alomar’s stories, fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency.

[His stories] convey a raw combination of beauty and resignation, as if the two were created to reside under the same roof, hope and hurt at one …. Alomar is a man of small but universally affecting insights.

The stories’ distinctive flavour comes from Alomar’s masterful shifts of character perspective within extremely tight parameters.…The book is full of these moments which trip you up, swing bluntly from one psyche to another, rapidly decelerate time and play with scale, all of it exposing the delicate balance of our presumptions and allegiances; the small dictatorships that we foster second by second.

In Alomar’s stories…fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency.