"A collection of short stories and 'veiled memoirs' that explore the chiaroscuro of a troubled life. From the leafy enclaves of Wimbledon to the 'intelligent chaos' of Beirut's Hamra district, Omar Sabbagh weaves a tapestry of 'crap decisions,' spiritual pride, and the somatic pleasure of the English language.".
"Sabbagh is that rare type of philosophically-minded writer whose prose has a big heart. In a time when we prefer to read less and read light, his stories ask us to dwell, to slow down, and to reread. This is where we will find both enjoyment and depth."
Adnan Mahmutovic, author of At the Feet of Mothers (Cinnamon Press, 2020)
"They say suffering runs through life like water. Omar Sabbagh is no stranger to it, but turns it into a wellspring for his fiction. We are invited to drink, but this is not bitter water, but a way to refresh ourselves and our thinking."
Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (Verso, 2020)
"Omar Sabbagh is that rare thing: a 21st-century man of letters. Unattached to either a politicized identity or a stylistic program, his sprawling, personal narratives are less interested in the literary zeitgeist than in the cadence of a phrase, the shape of a sentence, the sheer delight of the English language. They speak eloquently of people and things-the world as it is-but to read them is to lose yourself in the wondrous vagaries of literature, just as it should be."
Youssef Rakha, author of The Dissenters
(Graywolf Press, 2025)
Autorentext
OMAR SABBAGH
WRITERLY BIOG:
()
(0096176784832)
(Verdun 406, Verdun Street, Beirut, Lebanon)
Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published British-Lebanese poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf Magazine, Poetry Wales, Philosophy Now, among many others. For Echo was his sixth poetry collection with Cinnamon Press, released in Spring 2024. His first collection and his third were, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17). His fourth, But It Was an Important Failure, was published in early 2020. And Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, his fifth collection with Cinnamon Press was published in early 2022. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile,