A masterpiece of the night owl

Since your departure from the village and the town, we have been following your news and the stories you publish, and every time we gather for the evening, you are present with us, we talk about you, read, and discuss your stories secretly. We find in them our childhood memories, our simple love stories, our university years, our service in the army, and wars... and we feel that you express us. During the bitter years of the siege, when one of us felt embarrassed to visit a friend and stay up with him, so as not to burden him with hospitality duties, I collected all your stories that I obtained and duplicated them several times, wrapped them in cardboard, and wrote on them the title "The Night Owl's Treasure" and distributed them to other friends so they could read them by candlelight or lanterns after the children and family had gone to sleep. - From a reader's letter - *** This book includes all the short stories of Iraqi writer Dr. Mohsen Al-Ramli that he published over thirty years (1985–2015), and they are diverse in topics and forms, written at different stages, some first written and published in Spanish and then translated into other languages such as English, Portuguese, Russian, and German. Among the issues addressed are themes: love, war, migration, memory, cultural encounters, heritage, solitude, and existential concern. The stories also vary in techniques, language, and narrative styles between experimental, symbolic, traditional, between suggestion and explicitness, and between realism and illusion. Dar Al-Mada Publisher Author: Mohsen Al-Ramli Year of publication: 2017 Pages: 358