Y Knots

Linguistically dexterous, scintillating with intelligence and wit, and balancing incisive observation with deep compassion, the short fictions in Y Knots draw us into the lives of characters we feel completely involved with. Here we have a hall of mirrors in which the writer mines his soul for images that reflect the story. But in interrogating the self, what Omar Sabbagh produces is an engaging array of unique perspectives on all our souls.

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 off the page so compellingly shows a master at work.
- Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida

¿¿¿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

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.
- Adnan Mahmutovic, author of At the Feet of Mothers¿

About the author

Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf Magazine, Poetry Wales, among many others. For Echo was his sixth poetry collection with Cinnamon Press, released in Spring 2024. His first collection and his third were, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17). His fourth, But It Was an Important Failure, was published in early 2020. And Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, his fifth collection with Cinnamon Press was published in early 2022. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in March 2016; and his Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City was published with Fairlight Books in July 2019. He has published much short fiction, too, some of it prize-winning. A study of the oeuvre of Professor Fiona Sampson, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, was published with Anthem Press in 2020, and was released in revised, paperback edition at the end of 2021. His book of Lebanese verse narratives, Cedar: Scenes from Lebanese Life, was published with Northside House in summer of 2023; and a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in autumn of 2023. RIP: Poems after Gaza & Words after Waddah, a pamphlet registering loss in both a personal and political register, was published with Cinnamon Press in March 2024. He holds a BA in PPE from Oxford, three MA's, in English Literature, Creative and Life Writing, and Philosophy, all from the University of London, and a PhD in English Literature from KCL. From 2011-2013 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB); and he taught at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he was Associate Professor of English from 2014-2024. From Fall 2024 he begins a new teaching role at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

Product details

• Authors: Omar Sabbagh
• Publisher: Cinnamon Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.10.2023
• EAN: 9781911540212
• ISBN: 978-1-911540-21-2
• No. of pages: 268
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 16 mm
• Weight: 323 g
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature