Novel - A Being That Collides With Itself

Author name: Salem Adel Al-Shehab

Publication year: 2023

Number of pages: 108

This collection of short stories is not an original work. What is meant by originality here is its complete independence from what preceded it in short story literature, and literature in general, in terms of formality, the artistic tools used, and the basic structure of the text, and there is nothing wrong with that according to Borges, who believes that “the writer must draw his writings from ancient works, because the writer, as Dr. Johnson did not like to be indebted to his contemporaries.” But it is not a problem for me, as I am indebted to many contemporary writers, starting from Mansour Al-Atiq and Muhammad Al-Aradi to Patricio Brun and Slavoj Žižek, who were a great introduction to understanding Hegel and Jacques Lacan and the subject/object duality, which was a fundamental focus in many stories.