New Iraqi Fiction: Muhammad Khudayyir’s ‘The Tunnel’
As the police closed in, the protesters began to retreat, individually and in groups.
As the police closed in, the protesters began to retreat, individually and in groups.
“One of the trickiest, most mysterious secrets of the Arabic language is the root h-l-m.”
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.”