The surreal a nd fantastic flowered almost overnight amidst a well-established tradition of realism in modern Arabic literature. Determined by its social context, this movement towards literary fantasy mirro r ed the Arabs' histo r ical, political a nd cultural predicament, expressing the impossibility of realizing (conscious o r unconscious) desires within the existing dominant cultural o r der. Flights of Fantasy presents a variety of writing fr om across the Arab Wo r ld including: Naguib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani, Ghada Al-Samman as well as many others.