Selected short stories from the works of a new shining star in the Arab literary sky, an Iraqi filmmaker, essayist and fiction writer Hassan Blasim (Ḥasan Blāsim), who has been a political refugee in Finland for some years now. Blasim’s breathtaking stories are disturbing and exciting, bringing forth unimaginable scenes from the most recent past after the fall of the dictatorship in Iraq in 2003, tragic events in the US-occupied country and nearly surreal refugee tales of epic proportions that took place on the people smuggling routes leading from the Middle East to the West. The stories are written with a master’s technique that sometimes transcends the limits of magical realism. To this day, three short story collections have been published in English, in the excellent translation of Jonathan Wright: The Madman of Freedom Square (Comma Press, London 2009), The Iraqi Christ (Comma Press, London 2013), and a selection from the former two entitled The Corpse Exhibition (Penguin Books, London 2014). The mere fact that the third book was published by one of the most prominent publishing houses in the world, in its famous paperback edition, and that it was ranked among top ten books in the English language in 2014 by the renowned Publishers Weekly is on a level with major literary awards, which are already coming to his hands – for The Iraqi Christ he won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize becoming the first Arab laureate. The Madman of Freedom Square (Majnūn sāḥat al-Ḥurriyya) was published in Arabic only in 2012 (Al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa al-našr) and was, although ruthlessly “cleansed” of all “inappropriate” details by the hand of the censor, immediately banned in several Arab countries. You can read some of Blasim’s stories in the Arabic language at http://www.hassanblasim.com.
Geopoetika, Beograd 2015.
ISBN 978-86-6145-202-4
