Mordechai's Moustache and his Wife's Cats and other stories

• The first English collection for the master of surprise and the surreal moment, Palestinian author Mahmoud Shukair, translated from the original Arabic • An unexpected and even shocking take on life under occupation for both sides of the barrier • Included are the author’s two fascinating commentaries on his literary influences and his journey in writing. Mahmoud Shukair’s first major publication in English translation enthralls, surprises and even shocks as one of the world’s most original of storytellers excels in exposing the surreal moments in the ordinary and the mundane, the limits of human frustration and patience, and the intricacies of tiny daily obsessive practices.

Christina Phillips is a senior lecturer in Arabic Literature and Media at the University of Exeter, teaching Arabic literature, translation and literary theory. She has a PhD in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS, University of London. Her translations include Naguib Mahfouz’s Hadith al-Sabah wa’l-Masa (Morning and Evening Talk, AUC Press, 2008), excerpted in Banipal 30. Mahmoud Shukair has been a prodigious creator of short stories since 1962. He was born in 1941 in Jerusalem and grew up there. He studied at Damascus University and has an MA in Philosophy and Sociology (1965). He has published 67 volumes of works, including 14 short story collections, three novels, more than 40 books for children, a volume of folk tales, a biography of a city, and a travelogue. In addition to these, he has written six series for TV, four plays, and countless newspaper and magazine articles, including for online publications. Issa J Boullata (1929–2019), was an eminent Palestinian scholar, writer and critic, an educator and translator, born in Jerusalem in 1929. He started his academic career with a PhD in Arabic literature from London University in 1969. He is formerly Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. During his career he has translated many works from Arabic to English, and authored several others, including Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (1990) and in 2014, a memoir of his early life entitled The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem. Elizabeth Winslow is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, USA. Her translations include Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005), which won the American PEN prize for translation and was short-listed for the Griffin International Poetry Prize 2006. Some of her translations have appaered in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, Words Without Borders, Banipal, Circumference and World Literature Today.