The Corpse Exhibition And Other Stories of Iraq

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Year

"Surreal and mind-blowing and completely necessary." -Jayne Anne Phillips, The Wall Street Journal, "Favorite Books of the Year"

"Arresting, auspicious . . . Well-plotted, blackly comic . . . Sharp, tragicomic moments . . . persist in memory. . . . Its opening story [features] a terrorist middle manager who wouldn't be out of place in one of George Saunders's workplace nightmares. . . . 'The Song of the Goats' [is] a cunning gem. . . . If a short story could break the heart of a rock, this might just be the one. . . . The collection's last story is so complicatedly good [with] an ending worthy of Rod Serling. Mr. Blasim's stories owe more than a little of their dream logic to [Carlos] Fuentes and Serling, with maybe some Julio Cortázar thrown in. . . . Their sequence imparts a mounting novelistic power." -The New York Times

"Brilliant and disturbing . . . Bitter, furious and unforgettable, the stories seem to have been carved out of the country's suppurating history like pieces of ragged flesh." -The Wall Street Journal

"Superb . . . The existence of this book is reason for hope, proof of the power of storytelling." -The Boston Globe

"Subtly and powerfully evocative . . . Superbly translated." -The New York Review of Books

"Visceral, full of horror and absurdity . . . Blasim is an Iraqi Kafka with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe thrown in, and his pen spares no one who commits atrocities, Americans and Iraqis alike." -Brian Castner, "This Week's Must Read" on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered

"Perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive . . . [His stories are] crisp and shocking . . . cruel, funny and unsettling [with] hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind." -The Guardian

"A modern classic of post-war witness, elegy and revolt . . . Think Irvine Welsh in post-war and post-Saddam Baghdad, with the shades of Kafka and Burroughs also stalking these sad streets. . . . [Blasim] depict[s] a pitiless era with searing compassion, pitch-black humour and a sort of visionary yearning for a more fully human life. . . . Amid all the scars of combat, these stories seek and find comedy, magic, affection and even an urge towards transcendence." -The Independent

"Line for line and paragraph for paragraph, Blasim writes more interestingly than [Phil] Klay. . . . His content is more strange and striking. . . . Blasim is an artist of the horrendously extraordinary. . . . [His] stories are almost Hemingwayesque in their stripped-down style and content. . . . Blasim has a sense of humor. He must have learned his jokes from the Grim Reaper." -William T. Vollmann, Bookforum

"Brilliant . . . [A] much-needed perspective on a war-ravaged country . . . It is a slim but potent collection and will go a long way to making Blasim's name in American literary circles. . . . Blasim plants his flag squarely in the tradition of Kafka, Borges, and other writers of surreal and otherwise metaphysical fiction. . . . He has a vital subject and takes it seriously: Iraq and its people. . . . He has written a fresh and disturbing book, full of sadness and humor, alive with intelligent contradiction." -The Daily Beast

"A bravura collection . . . Mind-bendingly bizarre . . . Blasim . . . lights his charnel house with guttering flares of wit. . . . [Be] ready to be shocked and awed by these pitch-black fairytales." -The National

"Unforgettable . . . Very important . . . [Blasim's stories] could only come out of firsthand experience of the war." -Flavorwire, 10 Must-Read Books for February

"A vivid, sometimes lurid picture of wartime Iraq [by] one of the most important Arabic-language storytellers . . . Violent, bleak and occasionally beautiful . . . Dark and sometimes bitterly funny . . . Most of these stories feel ready to collapse or explode at any moment. . . . The reader walks on solid ground one moment, and the next t