Imra’a lil-Shitaa’ al-Muqbil امرأة للشتاء المقبل

He is capable of defeating you—waiting for you to dare and approach his pages, only to unleash a torrent upon you: a deluge of sorrow, love, disorientation, madness, accusations, visions, and memories. He has the power to move you to tears—even you, the composed, hardened soul, shaped by an era and its tools that have stripped away your very last vestiges of feeling and emotion.

He can fill you with sadness as he recounts the parting of two lovers—a scene he sketched before your eyes just moments ago—bringing to his prose the sensibilities of a poet.

He can make you smile, stir a sense of foreboding, or even drive you to strike your beloved before retreating early into sleep.

What he writes are not stories in the conventional sense—with clear beginnings, endings, and protagonists—and you know this well. You might rush to ask, "What kind of writing is this?" yet you find yourself reading on. A sense of the tragedy of loss emerges from his pages—a profound emotional upheaval, if you will.

His characters are made of paper; his settings exist nowhere; his events never truly took place—yet you fear that, in one way or another, they are actually about *you*. Is this hidden sorrow not your own? Is this woman not your beloved? Is this kind man not your grandfather, back in the distant countryside?

I call him "the storm of a writer," for the sheer intensity with which he lays everything bare.

He can make you feel the cold—a shiver runs through you as he describes his own wandering amidst the snow.

Do not read his work; it will unravel your relationships with others.

Do not read his work; it will pull you from your sanctuary—and never lead you back.