Young Jawad, born to a Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s, determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise.
Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood's project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland's past and its present--destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes--in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.
Youssef and Maha are living together in Baghdad. While Youssef is old and has lived through many good years, Maha is young and has seen only sanctions and war. Set over 24 hours, The Baghdad Eucharist unravels the lives of one Christian family in Baghdad. This intimate and remarkably human novel speaks both of Iraqs peaceful past and its tragic and painful present.
A risky and risque prison memoir depicts the collective nightmare of life under Saddam.
Through haunting poetry, the author reflects on the ruins of Baghdad, a city scarred by the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War, as well as the US invasion. Drawing from pre-modern Arabic traditions, the poems confront the pervasive violence and death that haunt his homeland. Nature serves as a contrasting solace, with flowers and butterflies symbolizing beauty amidst devastation. Composed in Arabic and translated by the poet, this collection offers a profound meditation on the impacts of war on humanity and the environment.