After a failed study mission in France, Abd al-Rahman returns home to Iraq to launch an existentialist movement akin to that of his hero. Convinced that it falls upon him to introduce his country's intellectuals to Sartre's thought, he feels...
Conceived as a murder mystery, a political reportage, a personal odyssey of a man who refuses to succumb to the need to define himself and his Baghdad in terms of one identity. First published in Arabic in 2008, "The Tobacco Keeper" relates the...