Hassan Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973 and studied at the
Baghdad Academy of Cinematic Arts. A critic of Saddam Hussein's
regime, he was persecuted and in 1998 fled Baghdad to Iraqi
Kurdistan, where he made films and taught filmmaking under the
pseudonym Ouazad Osman. In 2004, a year into the war, he fled to
Finland, where he now lives. A filmmaker, poet, and fiction writer,
he has published in various magazines and anthologies and is a
coeditor of the Arabic literary website www.iraqstory.com. His
fiction has twice won the English PEN Writers in Tranlsation award
and has been translated into Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Italian.
In 2012 a heavily edited version of his stories was finally
published in Arabic and was immediately banned in Jordan.
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year
“Surreal and mind-blowing and completely necessary.” —Jayne Anne
Phillips, The Wall Street Journal, “Favorite Books of the Year”
“Arresting, auspicious . . . Well-plotted, blackly comic . . .
Sharp, tragicomic moments . . . persist in memory. . . . Its
opening story [features] a terrorist middle manager who wouldn’t be
out of place in one of George Saunders’s workplace nightmares. . .
. ‘The Song of the Goats’ [is] a cunning gem. . . . If a short
story could break the heart of a rock, this might just be the one.
. . . The collection’s last story is so complicatedly good [with]
an ending worthy of Rod Serling. Mr. Blasim’s stories owe more than
a little of their dream logic to [Carlos] Fuentes and Serling, with
maybe some Julio Cortázar thrown in. . . . Their sequence imparts a
mounting novelistic power.” —The New York Times
“Brilliant and disturbing . . . Bitter, furious and unforgettable,
the stories seem to have been carved out of the country’s
suppurating history like pieces of ragged flesh.” —The Wall Street
Journal
“Superb . . . The existence of this book is reason for hope, proof
of the power of storytelling.” —The Boston Globe
“Subtly and powerfully evocative . . . Superbly translated.” —The
New York Review of Books
“Visceral, full of horror and absurdity . . . Blasim is an Iraqi
Kafka with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe thrown in, and his pen spares
no one who commits atrocities, Americans and Iraqis alike.” —Brian
Castner, “This Week’s Must Read” on NPR’s Weekend All Things
Considered
“Perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive . . . [His
stories are] crisp and shocking . . . cruel, funny and unsettling
[with] hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind.” —The
Guardian
“A modern classic of post-war witness, elegy and revolt . . . Think
Irvine Welsh in post-war and post-Saddam Baghdad, with the shades
of Kafka and Burroughs also stalking these sad streets. . . .
[Blasim] depict[s] a pitiless era with searing compassion,
pitch-black humour and a sort of visionary yearning for a more
fully human life. . . . Amid all the scars of combat, these stories
seek and find comedy, magic, affection and even an urge towards
transcendence.” —The Independent
“Line for line and paragraph for paragraph, Blasim writes more
interestingly than [Phil] Klay. . . . His content is more strange
and striking. . . . Blasim is an artist of the horrendously
extraordinary. . . . [His] stories are almost Hemingwayesque in
their stripped-down style and content. . . . Blasim has a sense of
humor. He must have learned his jokes from the Grim Reaper.”
—William T. Vollmann, Bookforum
“Brilliant . . . [A] much-needed perspective on a war-ravaged
country . . . It is a slim but potent collection and will go a long
way to making Blasim’s name in American literary circles. . . .
Blasim plants his flag squarely in the tradition of Kafka, Borges,
and other writers of surreal and otherwise metaphysical fiction. .
. . He has a vital subject and takes it seriously: Iraq and its
people. . . . He has written a fresh and disturbing book, full of
sadness and humor, alive with intelligent contradiction.” —The
Daily Beast
“A bravura collection . . . Mind-bendingly bizarre . . . Blasim . .
. lights his charnel house with guttering flares of wit. . . . [Be]
ready to be shocked and awed by these pitch-black fairytales.” —The
National
“Unforgettable . . . Very important . . . [Blasim’s stories] could
only come out of firsthand experience of the war.” —Flavorwire, 10
Must-Read Books for February
“A vivid, sometimes lurid picture of wartime Iraq [by] one of the
most important Arabic-language storytellers . . . Violent, bleak
and occasionally beautiful . . . Dark and sometimes bitterly funny
. . . Most of these stories feel ready to collapse or explode at
any moment. . . . The reader walks on solid ground one moment, and
the next the ground gives way—sending him tumbling into deep,
otherworldly holes.” —Chicago Tribune
“A blunt and gruesome look at the Iraq War from the perspective of
Iraqi citizens . . . Blasim’s stories give shape to an absurdist
world in which brutal violence is commonplace. . . . [For] fans of
Roberto Bolaño, Junot Díaz, and other writers who employ magical
realism when describing grim realities.” —The Huffington Post
“Shocking, urgent, vital literature. I will be surprised if another
work of fiction this Important, with a capital I, gets published
all year. If you’re human, and you are even remotely aware that a
war was recently fought in Iraq, you ought to read The Corpse
Exhibition.” —Brian Hurley, Fiction Advocate
“Startling and brutal . . . One of the most brutal accounts of
man’s cruelty to man I have ever read.” —Helen
Benedict, Guernica
“Corruscating, lapidary, deeply unsettling, Hassan Blasim’s stories
are not only without equal, they are a necessary reminder that
there is an other side waiting to give voice to the tragic costs of
these unnecessary, imposed wars.” —Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author
of The Watch and The Storyteller of Marrakesh
“Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic. . . .
[His] taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like.” —The
Independent
“Stunningly powerful . . . Brutal, vulgar, imaginative, and
unerringly captivating . . . Every story ends with a shock, and
none of them falter. A searing, original portrait of Iraq and the
universal fallout of war.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The first story alone blew me away. Don’t miss.” —Barbara Hoffert,
Library Journal
“Powerful, moving and deeply descriptive . . . All the stories
share a complexity and depth that will appeal to readers of
literary fiction [and] fans of Günter Grass, Gabriel
García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Excellent . . . Like hollow shards of laughter echoing in the dark
. . . Blasim moves adeptly between surreal, internalised states of
mind and ironic commentary on Islamic extremism and the American
invasion. . . . Extraordinary.” —Metro
“Iraq’s story must still be told, and we need Iraqi voices like
Blasim’s to tell it.” —More Intelligent Life
“Clever and memorable . . . Agreeably creepy . . . Move[s]
effectively between surreal and magical. . . . Blasim’s use of the
real-life horrors of Iraq [and] the fanciful spins he puts on
events make the horrors bearable—even as these also often become
more chilling.” —The Complete Review
“The first major literary work about the Iraq War as told from an
Iraqi perspective . . . Starkly visual . . . Luridly macabre . . .
Eloquent, moving . . . Effortlessly powerful and affecting . . .
More surreally gruesome than the goriest of horror stories . . .
Hassan Blasim is very much a writer in [the] Dickensian mould. . .
. These are tales that demand to be told.” —CityLife.co.uk
“Savagely comic . . . A corrosive mixture of broken lyricism,
bitter irony and hyper-realism . . . I can’t recommend highly
enough ‘The Corpse Exhibition,’ ‘The Market of Stories’ or ‘The
Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes.’ ” —The M John Harrison blog
“[Blasim is] a master of metaphor who is now developing his
own dark philosophy [in] stories of profane lyricism, skewed
symbolism and macabre romanticism. . . . [His work is] Bolaño-esque
in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic
complexity.” —The Guardian
“[A] chillingly titled collection . . . Part Kafka, part Orwell,
part magical realism, the stories . . . are so powerfully written
that even as they wrenched me from sympathy to horror, from reality
to fantasy, they left me enlightened, moved, and infuriated all at
once. . . . A mirror of war everywhere.” —Helen Benedict, Lit Hub
Ask a Question About this Product More... |