The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon & translated by Jonathan Wright [Used]

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory
 
“Formally daring, stylistically inventive, this is Antoon’s most complex work to date.” —Malcolm Forbes, The National
 
The 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.

About the Author

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, academic, and translator. He was born in Baghdad and studied English literature at Baghdad University. He left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He studied Arabic literature at Harvard, where he earned his doctorate. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His award0wnning works have been translated into fourteen languages. His is an associate professor in the Gallatin School of New York university.