Iraqi Novel

This work looks in depth at four authors - Abd al-Malik Nuri, Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman, Mahdi Isa al-Saqr and Fu'ad al-Takarli - who started writing in Iraq in or around the 1950s to explore a pivotal moment in Iraqi novel writing and a neglected area of postcolonial fiction.

The first anthology of its kind in the West, Contemporary Iraqi Fiction gathers work from sixteen Iraqi writers, all translated from Arabic into English. Shedding a bright light on the rich diversity Iraqi experience, Shakir Mustafa has included selections by Iraqi women, Iraqi Jews now living in Israel, and Christians and Muslims living both in Iraq and abroad. While each voice is distinct, they are united in writing about a homeland that has suffered under repression, censorship, war, and occupation. Many of the selections mirror these grim realities, forcing the writers to open up new narrative terrains and experiment with traditional forms. Muhammad Khodayyir’s surrealist portraits of his home city, Basra, in an excerpt from Basriyyatha and the magical realism of Mayselun Hadi’s “Calendars” both offer powerful expressions of the absurdity of everyday life. Themes range from childhood and family to war, political oppression, and interfaith relationships. Mustafa provides biographical sketches for the writers and an enlightening introduction, chronicling the evolution of Iraqi literature.

Pluralism in the Iraqi Novel is about the use of literature and the novel to express the new content of an Iraqi national identity constructed after the American invasion of 2003. Instead of the homogenizing national identity in Iraqi literature created before 2003, postoccupation literature presents Iraqi society as a kaleidoscope of multiple religious identities converging in an accommodating Iraqi national identity. The author argues that this could not have happened without the upheaval of 2003 and its consequent results: democracy and political restructuring that incorporated Shia for the first time into the ruling political coalition in recognition of their numerical majority. Literature was consequential to processing the complicated subject of Shia-Sunni relations and the sectarian identity of each and, even more, in the wake of the geopolitical events of 2003, literature was instrument in bringing representation of the Kurds, the small minorities, and even the last Jews of Iraq to the fore. As such, literature demonstrated its revolutionary power and formed the basis for a “New Iraq.”

Studies a neglected area of postcolonial fiction, fostering a better understanding of Iraqi culture and society This exploration of the work of Iraqi novelists begins with the early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. Particular attention is paid to detailed textual analysis and the evaluation and comparison of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the key works of the four writers who form the central subject of the book -- Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921-98), Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman (1927-90), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927-2006) and Fu'ad al-Takarli (1927-2008) -- all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s. It is in these writers' works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of them are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.

Born into a family of corpse washers, Jawad abandons tradition by enrolling in Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpting, but the conditions caused by Saddam Hussein's oppressive rule force a return home to the family business.

The Fog of War Baghdad, 2003. The reign of Saddam Hussein is over. The Americans are in command. And no one is in control. Former cop turned military contractor Christopher Henry knows that better than anyone. He’s in country to train up a new Iraqi police force, and one of his recruits has just been murdered. With civil authority in tatters and dead bodies clogging the streets, Chris is the only person in the Green Zone with any interest in finding out who killed him—or why. Chris’s inquiry brings him first to Sofia, an American-raised Iraqi who now sits on the governing council, and then to Nassir, a grizzled veteran of Saddam’s police force—and probably the last real investigator left in Baghdad. United by death but divided by conflicting loyalties, the three must help one another navigate the treacherous landscape of post-invasion Iraq in order to hunt down the killers. But are their efforts really serving justice—or a much darker agenda? Inspired by his real-life experiences as a CIA operations officer in Iraq, New York Times bestselling writer TOM KING joins forces with celebrated artist MITCH GERADS to deliver a wartime crime thriller like no other. The Sheriff of Babylon collects all 12 issues of the groundbreaking series and features an introduction by King and an afterword by Gerads, as well as a special gallery of preliminary artwork from Gerads and cover artist JOHN PAUL LEON.

War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is a groundbreaking study of Iraqi fiction published after 2003 examining the depiction of marginal experiences of war in Iraqi history.

By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories’ politics of meaning-making. The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, whose novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and storytelling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women’s story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women’s literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories’ geopolitical scope. This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, women’s literature, translation studies and women and gender studies.