Yet Iraqi literature continues, somehow, to blossom. There are older writers Fadhil al-Azzawi and Muhammad Khudayyir still at work (although the former in exile), and much younger ones, too: Thirtysomething Iraqi Hassan Blassim has been called “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive.”
I missed this in last week’s Al Ahram Weekly, but I suppose it wasn’t “timely” in any case: these are memories of a Palestinian who died in 1994 and whose Baghdad home was destroyed in April 2010. The news of… Read More ›
I have known Jabra Ibrahim Jabra—whose relatives and Baghdad home were lost to a car bomb last month—as a novelist and memoirist. However, the great Palestinian writer, who died in 1994, was also a music-lover, an art critic, a poet…. Read More ›
Somehow, I thought I could quickly track down each of these 100 titles, translate them (roughly), note whether or not an English translation or excerpt exists, and be done with it. Apparently, my eyes were bigger than my…fingers? So here… Read More ›
