The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Literature & Fiction

Antoon, Sinan

Literary

Yale University Press

Acclaimed and celebrated in the Arab world for its vivid portrait of Iraq, this heartbreaking novel confronts the war-torn nation’s horrifying recent history Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father’s wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the economic sanctions of the 1990s destroy the socioeconomic fabric of society. The 2003 invasion and military occupation unleash sectarian violence. Corpses pile up, and Jawad returns to the inevitable washing and shrouding. Trained as an artist to shape materials to represent life aesthetically, he now must contemplate how death shapes daily life and the bodies of Baghdad’s inhabitants.
Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon’s novel shows us the heart of Iraq’s complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.

British & Irish

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

The Book of Collateral Damage (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory\nWidely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans.\nEntrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

An inventory of the General Security headquarters in central Baghdad reveals an obscure manuscript. Written by a young man in detention, the prose moves from prison life, to adolescent memories, to frightening hallucinations, and what emerges is a portrait of life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In the tradition of Kafka’s The Trial or Orwell’s 1984, I’jaam offers insight into life under an oppressive political regime and how that oppression works. This is a stunning debut by a major young Iraqi writer-in-exile.
 Sinan Antoon has been published in leading international journals and has co-directed About Baghdad, an acclaimed documentary about Iraq under US occupation.

I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

City Lights Publishers

Iraq: 127

Edinburgh Review

Poetry. THE BAGHDAD BLUES presents documentary filmmaker/co-creator of About Baghdad, Sinan Antoon's first poems in English. Antoon studied in Baghdad and moved to the States after the Gulf War. Since then, Sinan Antoon completed his dissertation at Harvard, has taught Arabic and literature at Dartmouth and NYU, and has a novella just published by City Lights. Antoon's poems--many of them published in Banipal (London) and Across Borders, as well as anthologized--are not quite the thin trails they would appear to be. Antoon's line, although lyrical, is packed with the absence and fury which ought to make us shake a fist at the skies. If it were only the sky's fault.

The Baghdad Blues

Poetry

Harbor Mountain Press

A chilling poetic reflection on the world we have inherited and the destructions that made it.\nTo confront time, pre-modern Arabic poems often began with the poet standing before the ruins, real and imagined, of a beloved’s home. In Postcards from the Underworld, Sinan Antoon works in that tradition, observing the detritus of his home city, Baghdad, where he survived two wars—the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 and the First Gulf War of 1991—and which, after he left, he watched from afar being attacked during the US invasion in 2003. Antoon’s poems confront violence and force us not to look away as he traces death’s haunting presence in the world. Nature offers consolation, and flowers and butterflies are the poet’s interlocutors, but they too cannot escape ruin. Composed in Arabic and translated into English by the poet himself, Postcards from the Underworld is a searing meditation on the destruction of humans, habitats, and homes.

Postcards from the Underworld: Poems (The Arab List)

Seagull Books

Displaced by the sectarian violence in the city, Maha and her husband are taken in by a distant cousin, Youssef. As the growing turmoil around them seeps into their household, a rare argument breaks out between the elderly Youssef and his young guest. Born into sanctions and war, Maha knows nothing of Iraq's good years that Youssef holds dear. Set over a single day, The Baghdad Eucharist is an intimate story of love, memory, and anguish in one Christian family.

The Baghdad Eucharist: A Novel (Hoopoe Fiction)

Hoopoe

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Books by Antoon, Sinan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Antoon, Sinan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Book of Collateral Damage (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Book of Collateral Damage (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

Iraq: 127

The Baghdad Blues

Postcards from the Underworld: Poems (The Arab List)

The Baghdad Eucharist: A Novel (Hoopoe Fiction)