Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Year "Surreal and mind-blowing and completely necessary." --
Jayne Anne Phillips, The Wall Street Journal, "Favorite Books of the Year" "Arresting, auspicious . . . Well-plotted, blackly comic . . . Sharp, tragicomic moments . . . persist in memory. . . . Its opening story [features] a terrorist middle manager who wouldn't be out of place in one of George Saunders's workplace nightmares. . . . 'The Song of the Goats' [is] a cunning gem. . . . If a short story could break the heart of a rock, this might just be the one. . . . The collection's last story is so complicatedly good [with] an ending worthy of Rod Serling. Mr. Blasim's stories owe more than a little of their dream logic to [Carlos] Fuentes and Serling, with maybe some Julio Cortázar thrown in. . . . Their sequence imparts a mounting novelistic power."
--The New York Times "Brilliant and disturbing . . . Bitter, furious and unforgettable, the stories seem to have been carved out of the country's suppurating history like pieces of ragged flesh."
--The Wall Street Journal
"Superb . . . The existence of this book is reason for hope, proof of the power of storytelling."
--The Boston Globe "Subtly and powerfully evocative . . . Superbly translated." --
The New York Review of Books "Visceral, full of horror and absurdity . . . Blasim is an Iraqi Kafka with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe thrown in, and his pen spares no one who commits atrocities, Americans and Iraqis alike." --
Brian Castner, "This Week's Must Read" on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered "Perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive . . . [His stories are] crisp and shocking . . . cruel, funny and unsettling [with] hooks and twists that will lodge in any mind." --
The Guardian "A modern classic of post-war witness, elegy and revolt . . . Think Irvine Welsh in post-war and post-Saddam Baghdad, with the shades of Kafka and Burroughs also stalking these sad streets. . . . [Blasim] depict[s] a pitiless era with searing compassion, pitch-black humour and a sort of visionary yearning for a more fully human life. . . . Amid all the scars of combat, these stories seek and find comedy, magic, affection and even an urge towards transcendence." --
The Independent "Line for line and paragraph for paragraph, Blasim writes more interestingly than [Phil] Klay. . . . His content is more strange and striking. . . . Blasim is an artist of the horrendously extraordinary. . . . [His] stories are almost Hemingwayesque in their stripped-down style and content. . . . Blasim has a sense of humor. He must have learned his jokes from the Grim Reaper." --
William T. Vollmann, Bookforum "Brilliant . . . [A] much-needed perspective on a war-ravaged country . . . It is a slim but potent collection and will go a long way to making Blasim's name in American literary circles. . . . Blasim plants his flag squarely in the tradition of Kafka, Borges, and other writers of surreal and otherwise metaphysical fiction. . . . He has a vital subject and takes it seriously: Iraq and its people. . . . He has written a fresh and disturbing book, full of sadness and humor, alive with intelligent contradiction." --
The Daily Beast "A bravura collection . . . Mind-bendingly bizarre . . . Blasim . . . lights his charnel house with guttering flares of wit. . . . [Be] ready to be shocked and awed by these pitch-black fairytales." --
The National "Unforgettable . . . Very important . . . [Blasim's stories] could only come out of firsthand experience of the war." --
Flavorwire, 10 Must-Read Books for February "A vivid, sometimes lurid picture of wartime Iraq [by] one of the most important Arabic-language storytellers . . . Violent, bleak and occasionally beautiful . . . Dark and sometimes bitterly funny . . . Most of these stories feel ready to collapse or explode at any moment. . . . The reader walks on solid ground one moment, and the next the ground gives way--sending him tumbling into deep, otherworldly holes." --
Chicago Tribune "A blunt and gruesome look at the Iraq War from the perspective of Iraqi citizens . . . Blasim's stories give shape to an absurdist world in which brutal violence is commonplace. . . . [For] fans of Roberto Bolaño, Junot Díaz, and other writers who employ magical realism when describing grim realities." --
The Huffington Post "Shocking, urgent, vital literature. I will be surprised if another work of fiction this Important, with a capital I, gets published all year. If you're human, and you are even remotely aware that a war was recently fought in Iraq, you ought to read
The Corpse Exhibition." --
Brian Hurley, Fiction Advocate "Startling and brutal . . . One of the most brutal accounts of man's cruelty to man I have ever read." --
Helen Benedict, Guernica "Corruscating, lapidary, deeply unsettling, Hassan Blasim's stories are not only without equal, they are a necessary reminder that there is an other side waiting to give voice to the tragic costs of these unnecessary, imposed wars." --
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The Watch and The Storyteller of Marrakesh "Blasim pitches everyday horror into something almost gothic. . . . [His] taste for the surreal can be Gogol-like." --
The Independent "Stunningly powerful . . . Brutal, vulgar, imaginative, and unerringly captivating . . . Every story ends with a shock, and none of them falter. A searing, original portrait of Iraq and the universal fallout of war." --
Publishers Weekly, starred review "The first story alone blew me away. Don't miss." --
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Powerful, moving and deeply descriptive . . . All the stories share a complexity and depth that will appeal to readers of literary fiction [and] fans of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges." --
Kirkus Reviews "Excellent . . . Like hollow shards of laughter echoing in the dark . . . Blasim moves adeptly between surreal, internalised states of mind and ironic commentary on Islamic extremism and the American invasion. . . . Extraordinary." --
Metro "Iraq's story must still be told, and we need Iraqi voices like Blasim's to tell it." --
More Intelligent Life "Clever and memorable . . . Agreeably creepy . . . Move[s] effectively between surreal and magical. . . . Blasim's use of the real-life horrors of Iraq [and] the fanciful spins he puts on events make the horrors bearable--even as these also often become more chilling." --
The Complete Review "The first major literary work about the Iraq War as told from an Iraqi perspective . . . Starkly visual . . . Luridly macabre . . . Eloquent, moving . . . Effortlessly powerful and affecting . . . More surreally gruesome than the goriest of horror stories . . . Hassan Blasim is very much a writer in [the] Dickensian mould. . . . These are tales that demand to be told." --
CityLife.co.uk "Savagely comic . . . A corrosive mixture of broken lyricism, bitter irony and hyper-realism . . . I can't recommend highly enough 'The Corpse Exhibition, ' 'The Market of Stories' or 'The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes.' " --
The M John Harrison blog "[Blasim is] a master of metaphor who is now developing his own dark philosophy [in] stories of profane lyricism, skewed symbolism and macabre romanticism. . . . [His work is] Bolaño-esque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity."
--The Guardian "[A] chillingly titled collection . . . Part Kafka, part Orwell, part magical realism, the stories . . . are so powerfully written that even as they wrenched me from sympathy to horror, from reality to fantasy, they left me enlightened, moved, and infuriated all at once. . . . A mirror of war everywhere." --
Helen Benedict, Lit Hub