Seven Arab authors choose eighteen favorites of 2014.

Hisham Bustani, Jordanian short-story writer

Hisham Bustani, along with translator Thoraya El-Rayyes, won this year’s Arkansas Translation Prize for his The Perception of Meaning. Bustani is a young Jordanian author with four books out. The Perception of Meaning was his third. It is due out in English in 2016.

Anis Arafai – أريج البستان في تصاريف العميان – (Dar al-Ain, 2013)

Finding a writer dedicated to the short experimental form in the age where the fast-food novel has conquered all with its commodification, glitter, and market-sponsored fame can be similar to finding a needle in a haystack. Anis Arafai is one of those needles that prick deep and hard with uncompromising art. His fiction is innovative, relentless, and an agitation to the imagination. In this book, Anis takes us on the back of al-Buraq, the mythical creature that carried the prophet Muhammad to the…