reviews a nineteen-year-old Muslim man fall in love during a summer holiday in Lebanon. The latter’s father has no objection to the girl, provided she embraces Islam upon marriage, but points out other, financial, difficulties . However, horrified at the prospect of her daughter’s conversion and her husband’s anger, the girl’s mother insists that the relationship end. Interspersed with the episodes of this sad tale are the “what if?” reminiscences of a middle-class American woman who remembers a close, black, male friend of her college days, an inexplicably broken relationship between a white American man and a Senegalese woman, and the admonitions of her mother (“You can have friends, but keep your distances! Keep your distances!”), words echoed by her allegedly tolerant husband when his son wants a black friend to stay over. “Distances” poignantly embodies insights into the infinite value and precarious fragility of relationships in a harsh world. The reader, or at least this reader , wishes the stories in the last two sections were less “dreamlike” and more “rooted in time and space,” to quote the approving assertions of the back-cover blurb. Generally speaking , the further along in the book the story is, the less successful it is. Unconvincing and overwritten, works like “The Fisherman,” “Noor El Qamar,” and “Tell Me, Mayra” strain the reader’s patience. Finally, Interlink has not taken sufficient care with this collection. “[S]he had to improvise daily to maintain Simone and Charles occupied” is not English, “she could no longer bare the thought” is a solecism, and there are eccentricities of capitalization and punctuation throughout. M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley Syed Manzoorul Islam. The Merman’s Prayer and Other Stories. Translated by the author. Dhaka, Bangladesh. Daily Star Books. 2013. isbn 9789849027171 The first thing that strikes the reader who encounters the stories in this collection is the narrator’s role: how he talks to readers and plays with their expectations, dropping frequent hints in the process that this is a story he is a part of, or has received in a dream, or heard from a friend, or witnessed in his community. The narrator rarely pretends to be omniscient ; he is often confused and can’t seem to locate his place in the narration . He is familiar with all the major players in a story. Irony and humor are inseparable traits of his stories, as in “The Two Assassins.” Yet his narration has conspicuous resemblance with Bengali oral narratives wherein fairies and winged horses are as real as anything else in the material world. The narrator’s intention is all too clear: he is not offering reality as it is— he’s offering a world that defies reality or, to be more exact, manipulates it, to re-create fresh new possibilities and new realities for his characters. His characters come from all walks of life, from workers to abused women to those belonging to the middle class. Only their actions and reactions surprise us. They are victims of real life but refuse to give in to societal pressures. Sultana, the female protagonist in “Parapar Hotel,” had been forced into prostitution by a certain police officer and was privy to many secret crimes committed by the city’s political big guns. They feel threatened by her and want the police officer to get rid of her. Sultana, however , senses this well before and turns the table on the officer in such a way that he and his cohorts end up getting wasted instead. Magic plays a vital role in the narrative. In “Living Dead,” the soul of a young man is released from his body while he’s been in a coma to find out how he is missed, but what he experiences is hard truth: everyone has just forgotten him, and even his mother eventually forsakes him. 60 worldliteraturetoday.org Simon Fruelund Milk and Other Stories K. E. Semmel, tr. SFWP Milk and Other Stories is a compilation of fourteen short stories that follow the lives of fourteen ordinary individuals. These stories depict mundane moments that lead to moments of profound emotion. Instead of inflating ordinary moments, Fruelund makes the ordinary...