The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

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.

• Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel
• Redeployment
• The Queue
• Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq
• The Yellow Birds: A Novel
• Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq
• The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
• Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq
• War Porn
• War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning