Y Knots — Omar Sabbagh
ISBN: 9781911540212
£10.99
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Linguistically dexterous, scintillating with intelligence and wit, and balancing incisive observation with deep compassion, the short fictions in Y Knots draw us into the inner and outer lives of characters who we feel completely involved with. Whitman cautions writers: ‘‘Understand that you can have in your writing no qualities which you do not honestly entertain in yourself,’ says Walt Whitman in his journal.’ Here we have a hall of mirrors in which the writer mines his soul to for images that reflect back a story, But in interrogating the self, what Omar Sabbagh produces is a an engaging array unique perspectives on all our souls.
Praise for Y Knots
A testimony to a vibrant writing life some two decades long. Intelligent and passionate, these stories are singularities that make all the difference. Sabbagh seems to be, as he describes one of his characters, “an inexorably-thinking man,” but there is a certain rawness and playfulness to the stories which makes the philosophical grounding often quite hilarious. Sabbagh is also a unique chronicler of the Middle East and globalization. The prose has its way with cliches of our times.
Adnan Mahmutovic, Author of At the Feet of Mothers
Y Knots hold the Hanging Gardens of Babylon teleported into the tired aridity of a postmodern mind. The lushness of Sabbagh’s characters and settings is nurtured with such loving drip-irrigation precision that you’ll find yourself enamored with both his beauties and his beasts.
Svetlana Lavochkina, novelist, poet, translator
If, as Sabbagh writes, writing is always a performance and projection of a self, then Y Knots is the performance of a self breath-takingly prodigious and heterodox. That Sabbagh is able to weave this self into characters whose tussles leap of the page so compellingly shows a master at work.
Peter Salmon, Author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida
Cerebral, erudite, thought-provoking, the stories in Omar Sabbagh’s collection, ‘Y Knots’, are not for the casual reader, the dilettante of words. Their sophisticated prose requires careful and thorough attention. In fact, one of the aims of Cinnamon’s Liquorice Fish imprint is to lift ‘readers from being mere observers into conscious participants’ and Sabbagh’s work certainly suits that brief. Fortunately, such participants will find much to indulge in here. For there are dialectics covering philosophy, psychiatry, religion, economics – all reflecting Sabbagh own vast learning. And it is often up to the reader to decide if the conclusions reached are in Sartre’s ‘bad faith’, or true instances of ‘behold the man.
Yet, at the heart of each of the stories is a study into the human condition and, in particular, human relationships – married couples (good and bad), colleagues, friends, enemies, parents and children (the father/infant relationships reflect Sabbagh’s own wonder and tenderness towards his own child, as demonstrated fully in his poetry collection ‘Morning Lit: Portals After Alia.’). And such insights are relevant to all readers and help foster kinship with those who people landscapes (both mental and physical) less familiar than our own.
Diana Powell
Read the review on Buzz Magazine
At over 250 pages long, Y Knots, a collection of short fiction, is longer than many novels. As such, the book is immersive and expansive, pulling the reader into depths, days, and daydreams; streets, homes, and souls. The place is very often Dubai or Lebanon … read on here
And a review in the 2023 issue 13 of Occhiali, originally published in Italian
Author biography
Dr. Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet and critic. His work has appeared in, amongst others, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The London Magazine, Lighthouse, and Envoi. He has published several poetry collections with Cinnamon Press, including, But It Was an Important Failure and To the Middle of Love, and Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, as well as his debut fiction novella, Via Negativa — a parable of exile. He has published critical essays on a number of writers, including George Eliot, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. Omar has a PhD in English Literature from King’s College London and is presently an Associate Professor in English at the American University in Dubai.