Yumna Kassab’s debut short story collection, The House of Youssef, was published in 2019.

As Madeline Watts writes, it is a beautiful book reminiscent of the minimalist stories of Amy Hempel and Raymond Carver, all of Kassab’s stories take place in the Australian Lebanese community centered in the western suburbs of Sydney—a part of Australia think-pieced to death after election cycles, much like the American Midwest and England’s North.

Kassab’s stories focus on the downward spiral of the one family, threaded through with vignettes about other people in the community. Like the work of Carver and Hempel, Kassab has shaped the form to the content. In a craft essay for Kill Your Darlings, she writes:

“One day I looked around and saw I lived in an ordinary place. The people I knew were ordinary people, and the food I ate with these people belonged on the ground…This is life stripped to its essentials, and the wording in my stories has been chosen in a similar way. My language is humble. It speaks the story of a common life using a dressed down word.”