Fadhil al-Azzawi
Author
Language
English
Description
This timely, elegant novel's hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journalist with possible links to violent subversives. Then he falls in love with his friend's wife. The plot of this novel, which was written in Iraq in 1976...
Author
Language
English
Description
Being plucked from a Baghdad café and deposited in a cell block for political prisoners is a wakeup call for Aziz, the novel's hero and narrator, a young man who has been living on automatic pilot as if he were a guest visiting his own life and he is finally forced to come to terms with the flawed world we inhabit and shape. Although never charged with any offense, he must adjust to a lengthy stay in prison, where he is befriended by Salam the yard...
Author
Language
English
Description
First time ever in English translation for this acclaimed 'open work', published in Arabic in 1969 to great acclaim, written in defiance of the "sanctity of genre" and to raise the question of freedom of expression in writing. Variously called a novel or a prose poem, the author calls it an epic in prose, divided into cantos. In mid-1960s Iraq such an open-ended form, in which different genres come together and blend into each other, was difficult...
Author
Language
English
Description
Set in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk during the 1950s, The Last of the Angels tells the slyly humorous tale of three strikingly different people in one small neighborhood. During a labor strike against the British-run Iraq Petroleum Company, Hameed Nylon becomes a labor organizer and later a revolutionary, like his hero, Mao Tse-Tung. His brother-in-law, the sheep butcher Khidir Musa, travels to the Soviet Union to find his long-lost brothers,...