Hasan Blásim Books

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.

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 “[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.