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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > The Iraqi Christ

The Iraqi Christ

A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror…

A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims…

Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war…

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim’s stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq’s recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor – a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.

‘Bolaño-esque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity… a master of metaphor.’
The Guardian

‘Required reading for a real taste of life in Iraq.’
The National

Author

Hassan Blasim

Hassan Blasim

Books

The Madman of Freedom Square

The Iraqi Christ

Iraq + 100

Hassan Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973, and studied at the Academy of Cinematic Arts. In 2004, a year into the war, he fled to Finland. As well as being the director of numerous short films and one Kurdish feature film, Blasim is a poet and short story writer with several collections published, as well as work published in magazines, websites and anthologies, including Prospect magazine and Madinah. He has also worked as co-editor of the Arabic literary website www.iraqstory.com.

Translator

Jonathan Wright

Jonathan Wright

Books

The Madman of Freedom Square

The Iraqi Christ

Jonathan Wright studied Arabic at Oxford University in the 1970s and has spent 18 of the past 30 years in the Arab world, mostly as a journalist with the international news agency, Reuters. His first major literary translation was of Khaled el-Khamissi’s best-selling book Taxi, published in English by Aflame Books in 2008.

Published by

Comma Press, 2013
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A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror…

A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims…

Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war…

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim’s stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq’s recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor – a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.

‘Bolaño-esque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity… a master of metaphor.’
The Guardian

‘Required reading for a real taste of life in Iraq.’
The National

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