Hasan Blásim Livres

From the Iran/Iraq War through the Occupation, this collection of fictional short stories presents an uncompromising view of the relationship between the West and Iraq, as well as a haunting critique of the postwar refugee experience. Blending allegory with historical realism and subverting expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these tales manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real. For all the despair and darkness portrayed in these gripping stories—from spotlighting hostage-video makers in Baghdad to following human trafficking in Serbia's forests—what lingers more than the haunting images of war is the spirit of defiance and of indefatigable courage.

This collection of stories explores the chaos of post-invasion Baghdad. A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by a suicide bomber into swapping places. A composer of crossword puzzles survives a car-bomb, only to find himself haunted by the spirit of one of it's victims. A victim of looting flees armed robbers but falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinn, and the corpse of a Russian soldier from a completely different war.

First published in Arabic by al-Mutawassit, Milan, 2018.

Iraq + 100 poses a question to ten Iraqi writers: what might your country look like in the year 2103 - a century after the disastrous American- and British-led invasion, and 87 years down the line from its current, nightmarish battle for survival?

A mysterious black crate arrives at an ISIS command centre in the heart of occupied Mosul, leaving the soldiers and their captives guessing at its contents... A refugee travels to a remote ‘Northern’ town to study race relations, only to discover one of its bridge-building initiatives is, in fact, a trap... Drifting from job to job in a corrupt, militia-run Baghdad, a young daydreamer is asked to spy on a protest movement he finds himself entirely sympathising with... The characters in Hassan Blasim’s latest collection all find themselves in impossible positions – from the ISIS cook working undercover to retrieve ancient manuscripts from a desecrated site, to the refugee in Northern Europe unable to process the devastating dislocation of exile. Violence, intolerance and insecurity stalk them at every turn. And yet, for all their trauma, Hassan’s stories – strung through with intrigue and absurdist humour – are somehow able to draw us in and help us appreciate the infinite complexity implicit in even the most black-and-white contexts. ‘Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive’ – The Guardian ‘Brilliant and disturbing... bitter, furious and unforgettable’ – The Wall Street Journal on The Iraqi Christ