"An explosive new voice in fiction emerges from Iraq in this blistering debut by "perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive" (The Guardian) The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective, The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, Hassan Blasim offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war"--
| LoC Classification |
PJ7916.A42 .A2 2014 |
| LoC Control Number |
2013043633 |
| Dewey |
892.7/37 |
| Nationality |
Iraq |
| Pub Place |
New York |
| Dust Jacket |
no |
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"excerpt from Iraqi short-story writer Hassan Blasim’s “An Army Newspaper.” Blasim’s narrator is the cultural editor of a military newspaper during the Iraq-Iran War."
But I do admit that I would often interfere in the structure and composition of the stories and poems, and try as far as possible to add imaginative touches to the written images that would come to us from the front. For God’s sake, what’s the point, as we are about to embark on war in poetry, of someone saying, “I felt that the artillery bombardment was as hard as rain, but we were not afraid”? I would cross that out and rewrite it: “I felt that the artillery fire was like a carnival of stars, as we staggered like lovers across the soil of the homeland.” This is just a small example of my modest interventions."
