Download or read book The Salmiya Collection written by Craig Loomis and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Salmiya Collection, Loomis celebrates the essence of everyday life in a little-known part of the world. With lucid prose and keen detail, these stories offer nuanced portraits—tragicomic, bittersweet, and candid—of ordinary Kuwaitis: expatriates and natives, students and professors, siblings, and lovers. In "Ancient Civilization 101," a young man suspects his girlfriend Mariam is unfaithful and, in a fury, shears her long hair. The confidence and boldness in Mariam that first attracted him is now seen as a threat. In "The Conference on Rights and Freedom," two young students invited to present their paper at an academic conference in the United States share with their professor their dramatic plan to "show them who we are." Each of the forty stories in the collection reverberates with the others, illuminating a world the reader will not soon forget. Loomis renders a Kuwaiti society that is complex and distinct, and yet the characters and situations unveil a time and a place that is universal.