Hassan Blasim

Synopsis

A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by an insurgent into the ultimate act of terror…

A deviser of crosswords survives a car-bomb attack, only to discover he is now haunted by one of its victims…

Fleeing a robbery, a Baghdad shopkeeper falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which sits a djinni and the corpse of a soldier from a completely different war…

From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim’s stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq’s recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor – a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.

'At first, you receive Blasim with the kind of shocked applause you’d award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You’re quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best, Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony and hyper-realism which topples into the fantastic and the quotidian in the same reading moment.'
– M John Harrison

Reviews

** WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION AWARD **
**LONG-LISTED FOR THE 2013 FRANK O'CONNOR INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD**
**BOOK OF THE MONTH IN THE SKINNY**

'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...'
– The Guardian.

'Bolaño-esque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity... a master of metaphor.'
– The Guardian.

'Blasim’s vivid prose reflects the way the fantastic and the ordinary collapse into a Kafkaesque jumble during urban conflict.'
– The Financial Times.

'Required reading for a real taste of life in Iraq.'
- The National

'An arrestingly vivid picture of the privation and the terrors of life in Iraq.'
– Herald Scotland.

'His work never flinches from gore, sex, violence, blasphemy or misery – nor do these tropes ever feel exploitative. The rich combination of pitch-black gallows humour and fantastical flights from reality are utterly compelling – more real than anything you have read before about Iraq.'
- The Skinny

'Certainly, Blasim can write a story. But he may also have a flock of sparrows inside him, each struggling in its own direction, needing to tell its individual tale, to peck its way out into the light.'
- Egypt Independent

List Price £9.99
Price £9.50

Details
ISBN 978-190558352
Publisher Comma Press
Genre Short Fiction
Extent 186pp

Other Titles by Hassan Blasim

• The Madman of Freedom Square