The Corpse Exhibition
And Other Stories of Iraq
by Hassan Blasim
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Pub Date Feb 05 2014 | Archive Date Dec 04 2017
PENGUIN GROUP Penguin | Penguin Books
Description
“[A] wonderful collection.” —George Saunders, The New York Times Book Review
The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective—by an explosive new voice hailed as “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive” (The Guardian)—The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits.
Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, The Corpse Exhibition offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.
Advance Praise
“Perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive . . . [His stories are] crisp and shocking . . . cruel, funny and unsettling [with] hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind.”
—The
Guardian
“Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic. . . .
[His] taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like.”
—The Independent
“Excellent . . . Like hollow shards of laughter echoing in the dark . . .
Blasim moves adeptly between surreal, internalised states of mind and ironic
commentary on Islamic extremism
and the American invasion. . . . Extraordinary.”
—Metro
“Iraq's story must still be told, and we need Iraqi voices like Blasim's to
tell it.”
—More Intelligent Life
“Clever and memorable . . . Agreeably creepy . . . Move[s] effectively between
surreal and magical. . . . Blasim’s use of the real-life horrors of Iraq [and]
the fanciful spins he puts on events make the horrors bearable—even as these
also often become more chilling.”
—The Complete Review
“The first major literary work about the Iraq War as told from an Iraqi
perspective . . . Starkly visual . . . Luridly macabre . . . Eloquent, moving .
. . Effortlessly powerful and affecting . . . More surreally gruesome than the
goriest of horror stories . . . Hassan Blasim is very much a writer
in [the] Dickensian mould. . . . These are tales that demand to be told.”
—CityLife.co.uk
“Savagely comic . . . A corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony and
hyper-realism . . . I can’t recommend highly enough ‘The Corpse Exhibition,’
‘The Market of Stories’ or
‘The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes.’ ”
—The M John Harrison blog
“[Blasim is] a master of metaphor who is now developing his own dark
philosophy [in] stories of profane lyricism, skewed symbolism and macabre
romanticism. . . .
[His work is] Bolaño-esque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity.”
—The Guardian
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780143123262 |
| PRICE | $19.00 (USD) |
