“Kazem Ali would ignore the troubles that beset him one after the other because of his admiration of the Brazilian footballer Ronaldo… He informed the world of the existence of personal email exchanges between him and the popular footballer and that the correspondence had ripened into an unambiguous promise by Ronaldo that he would come with his wife and son and stay as guests in the village… In all this, of course, there was no problem… However, one morning when a passenger tried to sit in the front seat of the taxi that Kazem Ali drove, Kazem Ali stopped him and said, ‘The front seat is reserved for Ronaldo.’ The truth is that no one ever saw Ronaldo in Kazem Ali’s taxi, and rumors spread through the streets of the neighborhood that no one could imagine…”

This is a collection of short and very short stories by the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Shukair, who engages his readers skillfully with a sure hand and provides a rare and absorbing view of the daily life of the Palestinians under occupation. Shukair’s writing proves that literature and politics are inseparable and that irony, figurative writing, and allegory cannot be detached from the colonial context in which they are written.

Mahmoud Shukair is a Palestinian writer who was born in 1941 in Jabel Mukaber in Jerusalem. He has published more than forty-five books, including a novel, collections of short stories for young children, and plays. Shukair is known primarily as a master of the short story, and he has published four collections of stories and five collections of very short stories that have been translated into ten languages, including English, French, German, Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and Czech.