It’s publication day for Shalash the Iraqi’s series of posts — essays, short stories, satiric monologues, magical-realist sketches — translated to English by Luke Leafgren nearly twenty years after their first appearance online.
“After only a few days—let’s say less than the first week after the appearance of Shalash—he became a phenomenon that occupied public opinion. It was a terrible thing for me, to be influential in a way that I did not expect, and that I could not even imagine, in the sense that readers turned Shalash into their conscience and their exclusive voice.”
“Umm Da’bul was a bit taken aback when she discovered one day that her youngest, a child of ten, was peeing oil.”
