Mapped
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi
Baghdad under the US occupation, roughly 2005, a city broken by car bombs and checkpoints. The story is anchored in the old, run-down Bataween district of the central Rusafa side, where a junk dealer stitches body parts left by explosions into a corpse that comes to life and sets out to avenge the dead. The map runs from the neighbourhood's alleys and coffee house out to Tahrir Square, the faded grandeur of al-Rasheed Street and the Tigris that splits the city.
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Men in the Sun
Ghassan Kanafani
Three Palestinian refugees of different generations, the old Abu Qais, the bitter young Assad and the boy Marwan, gather in Basra and pay a driver, Abul Khaizuran, to smuggle them into oil-rich Kuwait hidden in the empty water tank of his lorry. Kanafani's route is real and merciless: the smugglers' quarter of Basra, the desert road south, the border at Safwan, and Kuwait just beyond, where the men bake to death in the tank during a fatal delay at the checkpoint.
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