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The short story collection “As a sunny day on the bench” by Palestinian writer Mazen Maarouf, published by Hachet Antoine/Nofal, will be published soon.
It was stated in the group’s brief: One book in which the memory of war meets its present and future. As for the heroes of the stories, they are from childhood, but they think like adults. Each story of the group can be read alone, and the group can be read as if it were a single and sequential story. There is no difference, as events follow quickly and move smoothly between seasons, and imagination remains its mainstay.
Thus, we will read about children with names they took from the streets in which they grew up, and review their diaries after the end of the civil fighting in Beirut, discovering boxing, bicycles, bullets and the caravan room. A diary that expresses a unique mixture of dreams, fear, and waiting for something to happen.
Mazen Maarouf is a Palestinian writer, poet and translator. Born in Beirut in 1978, he holds a BA in Chemistry from the Lebanese University. Books for the Lebanese and Arab press on cultural matters. He has written three poetry collections, “As if our sadness were bread,” “The Camera Doesn’t Pick Up the Birds,” “An Angel on a Clothesline,” and two short story collections, “Jokes for Armed Men,” which won the Al-Multaqa Prize for Short Story 2016 and “The Rats That Licked My Ears, a Karate Champion,” and a novel A short published in English entitled “The Curse of the Mud Ball Boy”. In 2004 he won the “Lana Literatura” award for poetry, and his collection “Jokes for Gunmen” in its English edition was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.