First time ever in English translation for this acclaimed 'open work', published in Arabic in 1969 to great acclaim, written in defiance of the "sanctity of genre" and to raise the question of freedom of expression in writing. Variously called a novel or a prose poem, the author calls it an epic in prose, divided into cantos. In mid-1960s Iraq such an open-ended form, in which different genres come together and blend into each other, was difficult to even imagine. For Fadhil al-Azzawi it was the core of a new vision of life after the country's tough political experiences, especially the bloody coup of February 1963, and then abysmal defeat in the June 1967 Six-Day War. The preface to the original Arabic edition noted: "Everything in this open novel returns to itself and acquires its own particular innocence, even in language, so that the novel becomes a poem, a play, a film, a painting and a piece of music all at once without ever meaning to [. . .] It talks about itself in its own very particular way, where it says nothing specific so that it can say everything."

Fadhil Al-Azzawi's Beautiful Creatures

Literature & Fiction

Al-Azzawi, Fadhil

History & Criticism

Banipal Publishing

This collection features poems from Al-Azzawi’s six previous Arabic poetry collections and many new poems. Springing from classical Arabic poetry, his poems speak to political exile, -cultural marginalization, and Middle Eastern and Western histories and mythologies. Al-Azzawi employs -humor, melancholy and tenderness to celebrate new worlds of possibility.Fadhil Al-Azzawi was born in 1940 in Kirkuk, Iraq. By the time he was -fifteen, he was publishing poems in the leading Arab literary magazines in Beirut and Baghdad. Al-Azzawi -currently lives in London.Khaled Mattawa (Translator) is the author of a -collection of poetry, Ismailia Eclipse, and the translator of two books of contemporary Arabic poetry, Hatif Janabi’s Questions and Their Retinue and Saddi Youssef’s Without an Alphabet, Without a Face.

Miracle Maker: The Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (Lannan Translations Selection Series)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Miracle Maker: The Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (Lannan Translations Selections)

"Unbelievably exciting...These are poems to read and reread, repeating the lines as though they were a secret between yourself and the page." --The Paris Review Evoking the sights, sounds, and tastes of contemporary life, the poets inHome explore the intimate world of everyday life, its agonies and delights. A glass shatters in a neighbor's sink followed by the stomping of "little feet"; a woman falls asleep on the shoulder of a man she doesn't know on an airplane; and a man passes his time smoking alone a café, observing the charge of activity all around him. The worlds these poets traverse are not devoid of politics, wars, and global migrations, and yet by taking the minutiae of everyday life as their subject they remind us of the need to periodically turn inward and find meaning in the specific and deeply personal. Featuring work by Iman Mersal (Egypt), Samir Abu Hawwash (Palestine), Ines Abassi (Tunisia), Fadhil al-Azzawi (Iraq) and others, this second book in the Calico series introduces readers to contemporary voices from across the Arabic-speaking world that are sorely underrepresented in the United States. Beautifully rendered into English by some of today's leading Arabic translators, these poems are presented alongside their Arabic originals in a bilingual collection that celebrates language and its power to transform even the most familiar surroundings into enchanting landscapes for us to inhabit, if just for a moment. The Calico series, published biannually by Two Lines Press, captures vanguard works of translated literature in stylish, collectible editions. Each Calico is a vibrant snapshot that explores one aspect of our present moment, offering the voices of previously inaccessible, highly innovative writers from around the world today.Home is the second book in the series.

Home: New Arabic Poems (Calico, 2)

Mersal, Iman

Hawwash, Samir Abu

Abassi, Ines

Two Lines Press

Set in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk during the 1950s, The Last of the Angels tells the slyly humorous tale of three strikingly different people in one small neighborhood. During a labor strike against the British-run Iraq Petroleum Company, Hameed Nylon becomes a labor organizer and later a revolutionary, like his hero, Mao Tse-Tung. His brother-in-law, the sheep butcher Khidir Musa, travels to the Soviet Union to find his long-lost brothers, and returns home to great acclaim (and personal fortune) in an airship. Meanwhile, a young boy named Burhan Abdullah discovers an old chest in the attic of his family’s house that lets him talk to angels. By turns satiric, picaresque, and apocalyptic, The Last of the Angels paints a loving, panoramic, and elegiac portrait of Kirkuk in the final years of Iraq’s monarchy. But as the grim reality of modern Iraqi history catches up with the novel’s events, we come to learn the depth and complexity of Hameed Nylon, Khidir Musa, and Burhan Abdullah, and al-Azzawi’s comic novel becomes a moving tale of growing up in a dangerous world.

The Last Of The Angels

Literary

The American University in Cairo Press

Being plucked from a Baghdad café and deposited in a cell block for political prisoners is a wakeup call for Aziz, the novel’s hero and narrator, a young man who has been living on automatic pilot―as if he were a guest visiting his own life―and he is finally forced to come to terms with the flawed world we inhabit and shape. Although never charged with any offense, he must adjust to a lengthy stay in prison, where he is befriended by Salam the yard boss, Mun‘im an idealistic university student with a beautiful sister named Salwa, Yusuf an idealist dispatched to the ‘Swamp,’ Salman an anarchist schoolteacher, and Mustafa an aged farmer who dreams of an alternative society. While these imprisoned revolutionaries teach Aziz to dream that an ideal city with his name on it may lie just over the horizon, the police supervisor encourages him to think of a simple crime to which he can confess so he can be charged and eventually released. Based on the author’s own incarceration in Iraq, Cell Block Five is a clear-headed, good-humored tribute to the prison’s men―both the inmates and the guards―and an indictment of man’s gratuitous inhumanity to man, pointing out that the transition from abused to abuser, tortured to torturer, can be an easy one. Written in 1971 and published outside Iraq in 1972, Cell Block Five―the first Iraqi prison novel―was later made into a feature film in Syria. Drawing the reader subtly into the political section of an Iraqi prison, this compelling story easily transcends cultural boundaries.

Cell Block Five

This timely, elegant novel’s hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journalist with possible links to violent subversives. Then he falls in love with his friend’s wife. The plot of this novel, which was written in Iraq in 1976 and published in Arabic in Germany in 1989, is further complicated by street protests in Baghdad following the Six-Day Arab–Israeli War of June 1967. Despite the grim subject matter of this novel, it is at heart a love story, lyrically narrated.

The Traveler and the Innkeeper (Modern Arabic Novels (Hardcover))

Contemporary

Being plucked from a Baghdad café and deposited in a cell block for political prisoners is a wakeup call for Aziz, the novel’s hero and narrator, a young man who has been living on automatic pilot―as if he were a guest visiting his own life―and he is finally forced to come to terms with the flawed world we inhabit and shape. Although never charged with any offense, he must adjust to a lengthy stay in prison, where he is befriended by Salam the yard boss, Mun‘im an idealistic university student with a beautiful sister named Salwa, Yusuf an idealist dispatched to the ‘Swamp,’ Salman an anarchist schoolteacher, and Mustafa an aged farmer who dreams of an alternative society. While these imprisoned revolutionaries teach Aziz to dream that an ideal city with his name on it may lie just over the horizon, the police supervisor encourages him to think of a simple crime to which he can confess so he can be charged and eventually released.Based on the author’s own incarceration in Iraq, Cell Block Five is a clear-headed, good-humored tribute to the prison’s men―both the inmates and the guards―and an indictment of man’s gratuitous inhumanity to man, pointing out that the transition from abused to abuser, tortured to torturer, can be an easy one.Written in 1971 and published outside Iraq in 1972, Cell Block Five―the first Iraqi prison novel―was later made into a feature film in Syria. Drawing the reader subtly into the political section of an Iraqi prison, this compelling story easily transcends cultural boundaries.

Cell Block Five: An Iraqi Novel

Genre Fiction

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

Books by Al-Azzawi, Fadhil