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Lion of Babylon -> RE: I'm ashamed to call myself an Iraqi. These people are animals!! (6/30/2007 10:31:16 AM)
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Zorba dude. Here is something just for you. Enjoy the article! [:D] Iraqi Novelists Making a Surge Iraqi Writers Hitting the English-Language Market With New Books, Translations English-speaking Iraq-watchers seeking a good summer beach read should keep an eye on Amazon.com for a fresh crop of new novels and translations of old favorites from Iraqi writers. As Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports for Lebanon's Daily Star: That tired old adage about literature in the Arab world - Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads - may carry more caustic bitterness than sweet nostalgia these days, especially among those who self-critically consider the region's cultural production to be at an all-time low. But a spate of newly published novels and first-time translations promises to give interested, English-language readers their fill of Iraqi fiction this summer. Ranging from philosophical treatise to magical realist tract, and racked throughout with humor, the writers behind these books suggest that while the country is falling apart, its literature is holding fast. A few of the forthcoming titles cited in the article include I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody by Sinan Antoon, a novel about a young student thrown into solitary confinement for ridiculing Saddam Hussein, and From Baghdad to Bedlam, a thinly-veiled memoir of author Maged Kadar's youth in Iraq and later life as an expat in London longing for home. Mohammed Khudayyir's Basrayatha: Portrait of a City, originally published in 1996, tells a tale of a fictional city based on Basra. Khudayyir, one of the few Iraqi novelists who still live in the country, wrote in Baysratha of the importance of writers for civil society. "None of us can imagine a city without a storyteller or a storyteller without a rostrum," Khudayyir writes. "This city has no history until time clothes it with the cloak of events. You begin its history wherever you wish by pulling from its cloak a thread with which to weave an incident or narrative ... I cannot imagine in Basrayatha a storyteller without a rostrum or a citizen without a loom. The rostrum and the loom are the secret emblems of this city." One hopes that wherever Khudayyir is now, he has access to a good rostrum and loom.
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