Today, in the year 1170 of the Hegira, as I finish the narration of my journey to Mount Meru, I can't help thinking about Omui. He was the best storyteller in all Mombasa. The fabulous stories he would tell every Friday in the square in front of the grand mosque always enchanted me. I keep the memory of that man alive within me. I like to think that I'm made of the same stuff and that like him, I too belong to the race of enchanters. Of course, I'm guilty of pride to think...

1 "What are you doing over there?" asked the dog. "Collecting feathers," said Lotta. She turned around. "And what are you doing?" The dog squinted in the sun. It was early in the morning. The sun's rays were slanted and did not give off much warmth. The dog was small and black and thin and very dirty. "I asked you what you were doing," said Lotta. The dog sat down in the grass and began to lick his front right paw. He wrinkled up his nose and cleaned especially carefully...

I I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29. I have been thinking about this for weeks—whatever one may say about it, killing someone requires both psychological and logistical preparation. I believe I have now reached the necessary state of mind, even if I have yet to choose the means with which I will do the deed. It is now a question of detail. I'd rather give myself a bit of latitude on this practical point, and in so doing add a measure of improvisation to my...

Magda comes in, but without Eric. She looks like something's happened, like she's been shattered into little pieces, her hair this way, her handbag that way, her dress to the left, her earrings to the right. Her panty hose all muddy on the left. Her face on the right, black tears flowing from her eyes. Like she'd been fighting in the Polish-Russki war, like the whole Polish-Russki army had trampled her, running through the park. All my feelings come back to life within me. The...

The two friends' meetings resembled a ritual that went back to the years of holy struggle when they would drink more cups of coffee than they could count to give them energy, a small vice Laid Touhami had picked up in the mountains and the mayor at a young age, since his father considered coffee an aphrodisiac and permanently wore a necklace of coffee beans round his neck. In fact, coffee had been behind Zineddine Ayachi's flight into the Ouarsenis and his joining the ranks of...

The two men were alone now. Or was it two women? The night stretched on endlessly. So did the mountain. And the frosted sky lying lightly over the mountain began to pale. The mountain stood facing them, bristling with rocky spurs, with clusters of thorn bushes: snow-dusted specters, already white-congealed. The men (the women?) were two lone figures. The silhouettes that had been climbing for quite some time now might well have been taken for two phantoms. Just the two men, alone, cut...

I am a dog. Who else but me can acknowledge it with such humility? Because I don't blame myself for anything, "dog" becomes no more than a word, a name: it's the name men have given me. But there you have it: I eventually accommodated myself to it. I eventually came to recognize myself in the destiny in which it decked me out. From then on, "dog" became part of my universe, because I made men's words mine. I digested the construction of their sentences and the intonations of...

Once upon a time, a long time ago-a very, very long time ago-in a corner of the world that was neither faraway nor near, there lived a girl whose name was Moon-Fairy. Moon-Fairy was kindhearted and helpful to everyone, but she carried a huge burden of sadness. She had no family or friends in the whole wide world. She was very lonely. She had been living with Bibi Khanom for as long as she could remember. Bibi Khanom had a daughter by the name of Golabetun, who was pretty but not kind. She...

Dina and Shlomo went out shopping. Their son, Dudi, stayed home. He didn't stay alone. Tally, his baby sister, stayed with him. His dog Rexie stayed with him too. Before Dudi's mother and father left, they stopped at the door for a moment, and his mother said: "If Tally cries, give her a pacifier." And his father said: "If the phone rings, just say we'll be back soon." "Okay," Dudi said, and they left. Dudi was sitting on the floor, playing with his fire engine....

The affable young clerk laid out the photographs on the glass case backlit by a small fluorescent bulb. Their reddish tint, a bit like the color of the lilies that grew everywhere in the summer, suggested discoloration. Though taken with color film, the pictures were monochromatic, as if they were black and white photographs processed with red toner. "The film's destroyed. It's been too long since you took these pictures. You didn't store it properly, either. You really...

Journalists who visit Iraq hear many stories, yet they are prevented from recording the majority of them because they must chase after the hot story, the quick journalistic news piece. A journalist might sit down in her hotel room to record the things she has observed, but in the frenzy of filing her report, not only will she forget these stories, but they will appear to her afterward as something faded, having lost its luster. It might even-and this is quite conceivable-appear to her...

Once upon a time an angel lost a feather. It hardly ever happens, only once every two or three hundred years, but it does happen. The angel was flying over a solitary lake, through the bluest waters of the sky; forests and blossoming meadows stretched as far as his eye could reach. He was enchanted to see such radiant beauty and descended to skim the water. It was then that he lost the feather. The water shivered as he passed, and when the angel rose towards the sky, the feather remained,...

1 He later recalled that it had been a strange, sleepless night. Sanogawa Shinsha had fallen asleep in bed with a script propped on his chest when word arrived that his younger brother, Tojaku, had just died in a car accident. Shinsha and his wife, Chisa, slept side by side on low matching beds placed in a bedroom decorated in a mixture of Japanese and foreign styles. Because Shinsha had a habit of reading scripts, memorizing parts, and planning roles late into the night, an antique...

This story is set in the time when monsters were still living up there in the mountains and down here in the forests. Granny Long Tongue and Red Ban the Ogre lived high up on Mt. Okuyama, at Okumata Pass. The woman's tongue was longer than a snakevine, stronger than a stable boy's whip. Red Ban's face was broader than a cottage window, and when he bared his tusks and moved his face up close to yours, he was so scary that even the mountain bears rolled their eyes in fright....

We live in the big house, all of us-men and women, boys and girls, and my mother and me. My mother captures all my attention. And she's ruled my heart too. I watch my mother no matter where she is: for she's the one who brings the hammer and pounds the nail into the wall so she can hang up a picture of my father. And she's the one who sends me off to buy half a kilo of cement and half a kilo of gypsum. Then she makes a paste. She closes up all the holes in the house and...

Everybody was gone, and Viktoria was home all alone. "When everybody's gone, my house is a magic place." She went to her parents' bedroom and pulled back the bedspread. A big bear lay in the middle of the bed. He looked right at her. "Aha!" Viktoria said. "Give me something," she said. The bear walked out of the room and brought her dad's hat to her. Viktoria put it on. Then she covered up the bear again. She opened her mom's nightstand. And there sat a big...

When Gabriel left his country for the first time he was 55 years old. At first he thought he was lucky to have escaped the communist hell. In his own city of Sighet it had become impossible for him to practice his watch-repair trade. His shop, like many other private enterprises, was confiscated by the state and he was forced to work for many years as a night watchman. His wife Lea-who had been deported to Transnistria in her youth-insisted they emigrate to Israel, but when they finally...

For many, Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. Few are aware of his lifelong fascination with computers. The heroes' glory might be measured by the length of the streets that they are allotted postmortem. If one judges this way, Sergeant Levarda must have been a mere novice in the hero business. "Novice" seems an overstatement, if one considers that three cars parked one after the other sufficed to cover the whole length (and width) of that street. Should we...

I am alive. Alive. My fingers look like nine little soldiers doing their drill in front of the window. In the building across the street a dustcloth waves at me. The hand doing the dusting is invisible. Only the dancing dustcloth. If I turn my back to it, I see an empty room. The wooden floor creaks and sags. How will I sleep here? I moved four hours ago. Or maybe five? The first thing I did when I came into the room was to line up my cosmetics on the floor. The bright bottles gave...

Editor's Note: The novel To Live in Sin (1996) is dedicated to the pogrom of the Romanian Jewish population in Jassy, June 29, 1941. This mass murder (over 10,000 victims), and the deportation of the Jewish population of the Bukovina region to Transnistria, in Ukraine, are the "contribution" of Romania under the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu to the Final Solution. These crimes were committed with terrible cruelty and they happened before the famous Wansee Conference....