Writing Iraq

Thoughtful and articulate piece by Pankaj Mishra in Saturday's Guardian Review on new books about the US invasion of Iraq. Non-fiction books, that is, mainly by journalists. Mishra compares their output to the major, and more incriminatory/inflammatory, books published contemporaneous to the Vietnam war -- it would be interesting to take his argument further, and discuss the novels and poetry emerging from and about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One notable difference is that the major novels about Vietnam published in the US -- like Tim O'Brien's The Things We Carried (and the almost 600 others listed in Sandra Wittman's 1989 bibliography Writing about Vietnam) -- were written by Americans, but writers such as the Iraqi journalist Iqbal al-Qazwini, are giving an alternative perspective. Just as blogs by Riverbend and Salam Pax offered much-needed insight (and balance) to mainstream reporting of the situation in Iraq, so books like al-Qazwini's Zubaida's Window, which is published in English by the Feminist Press at CUNY, are an immediate and important counterweight to what -- as Gregory Cowie points out in the NY Times books blog -- is complete silence from American novelists where the invasion of Iraq is concerned.

Discoveries: Online vs. Real-World Browsing

Over the past few months, as the moderator on the English PEN Atlas, I've discovered a wealth of new titles by the power of Googling -- searching, following links, working through publishers' catalogues. But sometimes I need to go and smell the books and undertake some real-life Googling, or browsing as it was once known. A trip to the Toronto Women's Bookstore turned up two new names (new to me, anyway): Iqbal al-Qazwini and Sahar Khalifeh. al-Qazwini is an Iraqi-born freelance journalist now living in Berlin, and her first novel Zubaida's Window is the first Iraqi novel published in English to focus on the 2003 invasion. Khalifeh is a Naguib Mahfouz-medal winning Palestinian novelist and feminist, whose Wild Thorns is considered the classic chronicle of life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

If you follow the links of the Atlas, they could lead you to other Iraqi and Palestinian writers. Or you could try searching "occupation" to discover thematically-connected books. It's like a bookshop whose shelves are constantly re-arranging in different constellations (countries, authors, themes) -- but, as the trip to TWB reminded me, it's also a stage on a journey to the bookstore where you can find hard copies of the texts that have tempted you virtually. TWB has regional sections (Middle East, Pacific Asian, for example), which is unusual and means they carry a lot of books in translation and by writers in exile… Word Power in Edinburgh is another globally-focused, outward-looking store. Both see carrying literature in translation as a social, political and pedagogical responsibility -- as well as making for a rich literary culture.

What are your favourite bookstores for tracking down literature in translation? Do you order straight from the publishers (see the blog sidebar for some of the great publishers -- and let us know who we're missing)? Book fairs? Online specialist bookstores like the Spain-based Libreria Mundo Arabe? One of the thrills of being a reader is visiting bookstores as you travel -- as suggestions come in, I'll build a sidebar list of great bookshops as recommended by you.