Libyan Stories

First Published in 2000. This is a collection of twelve short stories from Libya that Fagih edited during the seventies and eighties, initially published in a London magazine called Azure. Penned by prominent Libyan writers, these stories shed light on the human experience of people in the eastern world.

Ahmed Fagih, PhD. is a writer of international standing. His writings include the award winning trilogy Gardens of the night and a large body of novels, plays, short story collections, and essays. His dramas were performed in so many countries and his books widely read and translated. He found and chaired many institutions in his county and abroad among the posts he occupied the chairman of Arab Cultural Trust. The general secretary of union of writers and artists, the director of the national institute of drama and music. He directed and performed many plays for the theatre group he founded in Tripoli The New Theatre. He served as the head of his countries diplomatic missions in Athens and Bucharest. He is the chairman of the Mizda heritage society and was awarded the highest medal in his country The grand al-fatah medal.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance. Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie? Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television. In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.

Part anthology and part travelogue, Translating Libya presents the country through the eyes of sixteen Libyan short story writers and one American diplomat. Intrigued by the apparent absence of 'place' in modern Libyan short fiction, Ethan Chorin resolved to track down and translate stories that specifically mention cities and landmarks in Libya. The stories trace the influence of the ancient Romans, the later Italian occupation and the current influx of foreign workers from Africa and further afield. The authors open a window on today's Libya - a rapidly urbanizing country with rich oil reserves, recently renewed diplomatic relations with the West and a nascent tourist industry based on its well-preserved ancient cities. This is a unique introduction to a country that has for some time been 'off the beaten path'. Ethan Chorin served from 2004-6 as the first US Commercial/Economic Attache stationed in Libya since 1980.

This book offers a novel, incisive and wide-ranging account of Libya's '17 February Revolution' by tracing how critical towns, communities and political groups helped to shape its course. Each community, whether geographical (e.g. Misrata, Zintan), tribal/communal (e.g. Beni Walid) or political (e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood) took its own path into the uprisings and subsequent conflict of 2011, according to their own histories and relationship to Muammar Qadhafi's regime. The story of each group is told by the authors, based on reportage and expert analysis, from the outbreak of protests in Benghazi in February 2011 through to the transitional period following the end of fighting in October 2011. They describe the emergence of Libya's new politics through the unique stories of those who made it happen, or those who fought against it. The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath brings together leading journalists, academics, and specialists, each with extensive field experience amidst the constituencies they depict, drawing on interviews with fighters, politicians and civil society leaders who have contributed their own account of events to this volume.

Follows a fifteen-year-old girl who, after presenting Gaddafi with a bouquet of flowers during a visit to her school, was summoned to his compound where she, along with a number of young women, was violently abused, raped, and degraded.

Centered around the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Libyan Sugar is a road trip through a war zone, detailed through photographs, journal entries, and written communication with family and colleagues. A record of Michael Christopher Brown's life both inside and outside Libya during that year, the work is about a young man going to war for the first time and his experience of that age-old desire to get as close as possible to a conflict in order to discover something about war and something about himself, perhaps a certain definition of life and death.