Press release of The thirty-second issue, January 2012:

Supported by The British Council in Cairo, the thirty-second issue, January 2012, of Albawtaka Review sheds light on four literary talents. Albawtaka Review is an Arabic independent non-profit online quarterly concerned with translating English short fiction. Its archive includes seventy-four biographies and the translated texts of eighty-six English stories. Receiving a grant from The Arab Fund for Arts & Culture in 2010, this is the second honor awarded to Albawtaka Review.

"Silent Passengers" by Larry Woiwode was published in The New Yorker, 1992, then appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1993 and Woiwode's story collection Silent Passengers. Woiwode is the author of five novels, including What I'm Going To Do, I Think (1969) and Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975). He has been a John Dos Passos Prize winner, and a recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award and the Medal of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Woiwode wrote about human connectedness as expressed in family life across generations — relations between fathers and sons, husbands and wives. He was fascinated by the power of place to shape personal identity. His fluid structures and style suggested time’s permeability, capturing how memories from various periods flowed freely through their present actions, how consciousness built itself.

Appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1993, "What the Thunder Said" by Janet Peery was published in Black Warrior Review, 1992. Peery's collection of interconnected stories, What the Thunder Said (2007), won WILLA Award for Contemporary Fiction. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship. Peery teaches at Old Dominion University. Sometimes considered a "writer's writer" for her dense prose that pays close attention to craft, Peery explores themes of flight, renewal, and remaking in the American West. Her gift is for choosing the perfect image, one that imbues flesh and landscape with a dense spiritual and psychological weight, and for arranging her sentences with a sense of timing and proportion. The tang of her characters’ personality is balanced against the rich lyricism of her language, but always with a restrained touch.

"The Ugly Beetle" was first published in Tony Eprile's story collection, Temporary Sojourner: And Other South African Stories (1989). The collection will be re-issued by PFP Publications as a paperback and also an e-book. Eprile has won the Koret Foundation Jewish Book Prize for his novel The Persistence of Memory (2004), which was named a "notable book" by The L.A. Times; Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant; and Shane Stevens Fellowship in Fiction. He was a visiting writer in the University of Iowa. He also worked as an assistant professor in Northwestern University. Eprile now teaches creative writing in MFA creative writing Program, Lesley University. His story "The Ugly Beetle" tells of an African man, deformed in infancy by a tribal ritual and forced into beggary, who fashions a life of unique strength and status, only to be confronted by his ultimately inescapable vulnerability.

"Red Moccasins" by Susan Power was published in Story, 1992, then appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1993. It's a part of her novel The Grass Dancer, 1994, which received the PEN/Hemmingway Award. Raised to be politically and socially aware, Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. She received an A.B. in psychology from Harvard/Radcliffe, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories have been published in Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Power uses the strength of ancestry, dream images, and narration through storytelling to tell about her personal experiences as a Native American woman. When The Grass Dancer appeared, it was greeted as "captivating" by The New York Times. "This is not magic realism, which consciously alters the world in order to expand its circumference, but a factual representation of reality as it is perceived by the characters," wrote the reviewer.