Mohammed al-Mahzangi is an Egyptian short story writer, born in 1963 in the city of al-Mansoura, in Lower Egypt, where he graduated from the medical faculty of the university. In the late 1980s, he specialized in psychiatry for four years in Kiev, where he witnessed the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, about which he wrote an essay-reportage and several short stories. After twelve years as a doctor, he moved to work in the press, and is currently an adviser to the Cairo editorial board of the Kuwaiti magazine Al-Arabi. M. al-Makhzangi has seven books of short stories, two books for children, a scientific work on alternative medicine and a collection of essays about his trips to different countries of the world (the latter in an electronic version). In 1992, M. al-Mahzangi received the award for the best short story collection of the year, and in 2005-the national literary Award for the best Egyptian short story writer. M. al-Makhzangi's work is imbued with a vivid sense of love, pain, and compassion for his characters. The writer sees the tragedy of the world in the constant confrontation of life and death, in the fact that every person can at any time become a victim of a disease, a man-made catastrophe, a natural cataclysm, an armed conflict. He reveals in his stories the inherent love of life and defends the human right to life. In the collection " Animals of our days "("Haywanat Ayamina", Cairo, 2006), two stories from which "Gazelles" and "On the back of an elephant" are published in this issue, the world appears in the interconnectedness, interaction of wildlife and people, we are talking about the qualities of" humanity", sometimes manifested in animals, and about the signs of" brutalization " observed in modern humans. But the writer also talks about what distinguishes a person from an animal, about the power of human love, about kindness that can save one's neighbor. The collection's stories are preceded by epigraphs from works about animals by medie ... Read more