Search results for ""author sinan antoon""
City Lights Books I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody
An inventory of the General Security headquarters in central Baghdad reveals an obscure manuscript. Written by a young man in detention, the prose moves from prison life, to adolescent memories, to frightening hallucinations, and what emerges is a portrait of life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In the tradition of Kafka's The Trial or Orwell's 1984, I'jaam offers insight into life under an oppressive political regime and how that oppression works. This is a stunning debut by a major young Iraqi writer-in-exile. Sinan Antoon has been published in leading international journals and has co-directed About Baghdad, an acclaimed documentary about Iraq under US occupation.
£9.99
Seagull Books London Ltd Postcards from the Underworld – Poems
A chilling poetic reflection on the world we have inherited and the destructions that made it. To confront time, pre-modern Arabic poems often began with the poet standing before the ruins, real and imagined, of a beloved’s home. In Postcards from the Underworld, Sinan Antoon works in that tradition, observing the detritus of his home city, Baghdad, where he survived two wars—the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 and the First Gulf War of 1991—and which, after he left, he watched from afar being attacked during the US invasion in 2003. Antoon’s poems confront violence and force us not to look away as he traces death’s haunting presence in the world. Nature offers consolation, and flowers and butterflies are the poet’s interlocutors, but they too cannot escape ruin. Composed in Arabic and translated into English by the poet himself, Postcards from the Underworld is a searing meditation on the destruction of humans, habitats, and homes.
£14.99
Yale University Press The Corpse Washer
Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi’ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor—to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father’s wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the economic sanctions of the 1990s destroy the socioeconomic fabric of society. The 2003 invasion and military occupation unleash sectarian violence. Corpses pile up, and Jawad returns to the inevitable washing and shrouding. Trained as an artist to shape materials to represent life aesthetically, he now must contemplate how death shapes daily life and the bodies of Baghdad’s inhabitants. Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon’s novel shows us the heart of Iraq’s complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.
£12.02
The American University in Cairo Press The Baghdad Eucharist
Youssef and Maha are distant relatives who find themselves living together in their native Baghdad, seeking shelter and solace from the increasing turmoil that surrounds them. While Youssef is old and has lived through many good years, Maha is young and has seen only sanctions and war. Her life has been shattered by the sectarian violence engulfing Iraq, a country she feels no longer belongs to her. As the chaos in the country inevitably seeps into their household, a rare argument between Maha and Youssef breaks out, as this fateful day takes an unexpected and calamitous turn. Set over 24 hours, The Baghdad Eucharist unravels through the lives of one Christian family; it speaks both to Iraq's peaceful past, as well as its tragic and painful present.
£11.24
Yale University Press The Book of Collateral Damage
Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory “Formally daring, stylistically inventive, this is Antoon’s most complex work to date.” —Malcolm Forbes, The National The celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.
£12.82
University of California Press Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems
Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language, and beloved as the voice of his people. A legend in Palestine, his lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary traditions while simultaneously struggling to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish's entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form. A splendid team of translators has collaborated with the poet on these new translations, which capture Darwish's distinctive voice and spirit. Fady Joudah's foreword, new to this edition, addresses Darwish's enduring legacy following his death in 2008.
£22.50
University of California Press Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982
One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). "Memory for Forgetfulness" is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage. Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity. Sinan Antoon's foreword, written expressly for this edition, sets Darwish's work in the context of changes in the Middle East in the past thirty years.
£22.50
GOST Books Glad Tidings of Benevolence
Twenty years ago, Moises Saman was working in Iraq as a photojournalist during the US-led invasion and occupation. Glad Tidings of Benevolence combines his photographs taken during this period and the following years with disparate documentation and texts. Collectively, these materials raise questions about the complex representation of war, competing narratives and the truths buried within the clamour—at a time when the war begins to recede from global public memory. ‘My photographs are not meant to represent an objective account of the Iraq war against which to compare the textual references. Rather, the book grapples with my own role and power as a narrator - particularly one with access to foreign publications - and the biases and limitations inevitably embedded in my work.’ Saman began working as a newspaper photographer in Iraq just before the invasion. He has covered the US occupation and withdrawal, displacement, ethnic cleansing and other human rights and humanitarian crises, governance issues and the rise and fall of ISIS.
£65.00
