WINNER OF THE 2014 INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE
'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' - The Guardian.
A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror...
A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims...
Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war...
From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim's stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq's recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor - a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.
'Required reading for a real taste of life in Iraq.' - The National
'He writes in a terse, unsettling but nevertheless lyrical style. There is the same queer mixture of clarity and disalignment you feel while reading Kafka's short stories. It is the terrible clarity that comes with fear, where every particle of the street seems fresh and crisp, and it seems like these are your last impressions of the world.' - 3:AM
'Well-written, highly inventive, and difficult, Blasim reminded me what truly great writing can be.' - Dead Ink Books.
'At first, you receive Blasim with the kind of shocked applause you'd award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You're quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best, Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony and hyper-realism which topples into the fantastic and the quotidian in the same reading moment.' - M John Harrison
** WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION' AWARD **
Genre: Literary Fiction
'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' - The Guardian.
A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror...
A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims...
Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war...
From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim's stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq's recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor - a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.
'Required reading for a real taste of life in Iraq.' - The National
'He writes in a terse, unsettling but nevertheless lyrical style. There is the same queer mixture of clarity and disalignment you feel while reading Kafka's short stories. It is the terrible clarity that comes with fear, where every particle of the street seems fresh and crisp, and it seems like these are your last impressions of the world.' - 3:AM
'Well-written, highly inventive, and difficult, Blasim reminded me what truly great writing can be.' - Dead Ink Books.
'At first, you receive Blasim with the kind of shocked applause you'd award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You're quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best, Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony and hyper-realism which topples into the fantastic and the quotidian in the same reading moment.' - M John Harrison
** WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION' AWARD **
Genre: Literary Fiction
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Used availability for Hassan Blasim's The Iraqi Christ