A groundbreaking anthology of science fiction from Iraq that will challenge your perception of what it means to be "The Other""History is a hostage, but it will bite through the gag you tie around its mouth, bite through and still be heard."—Operation DanielIn a calm and serene world, one has the luxury of imagining what the future might look like.Now try to imagine that future when your way of life has been devastated by forces beyond your control.Iraq + 100 poses a question to Iraqi writers (those who still live in that nation, and those who have joined the worldwide diaspora): What might your home country look like in the year 2103, a century after a disastrous foreign invasion?Using science fiction, allegory, and magical realism to challenge the perception of what it means to be "The Other", this groundbreaking anthology edited by Hassan Blasim contains stories that are heartbreakingly surreal, and yet utterly...

A blistering debut that does for the Iraqi perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan what Phil Klay's Redeployment does for the American perspective 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...

** WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION' AWARD ** 'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' – The Guardian. 'Required reading for a real taste of life in Iraq.' - The National 'He writes in a terse, unsettling but nevertheless lyrical style. There is the same queer mixture of clarity and disalignment you feel while reading Kafka’s short stories. It is the terrible clarity that comes with fear, where every particle of the street seems fresh and crisp, and it seems like these are your last impressions of the world.' - 3:AM 'Well-written, highly inventive, and difficult, Blasim reminded me what truly great writing can be.' - Dead Ink Books. 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. 'At first, you receive Blasim with the kind of shocked applause you’d award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You’re quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best, Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony and hyper-realism which topples into the fantastic and the quotidian in the same reading moment.' – M John Harrison