Evening with Sinan Antoon & His Novel on Iraq: “The Book of Collateral Damage”

Sinan Antoon’s new novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar studying in the US who returns to Iraq in 2003 and witnesses the devastation of the US invasion. Nameer encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalog everything destroyed by the war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to human beings and memory itself.

*A New York Times Recommended Pick*

“…The Book of Collateral Damage reaffirms Sinan Antoon’s place amongst some of our very best writers. Vividly imagined and sensitively told, this is a tale of one man’s exile and return, and all the distances traveled to find a semblance of home.”
—Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar and translator. He was born and raised in Baghdad, and came to the US after the 1991 Gulf War. His poems and essays have appeared in al-Akhbar, The Nation, Middle East Report, New York Times and other publications. He teaches at the Gallatin School, New York University.

The Book of Collateral Damage was translated from Arabic into English by Jonathan Wright.