Notes from a Lost Country

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, and translator. He left Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War. Antoon received his PhD from Harvard in 2006 and currently lives in New York, where he is associate professor of Arabic literature at NYU. He is the cofounder and co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya (http://www.jadaliyya.com/) which is published in Arabic and English. His novel Index (Yale UP, 2015) was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and The Pomegranate Alone (The Corpse Washer, Yale UP, 2014) was awarded The Arabic Literature Prize 2017 and the World Arab Institute-Lagardère.

‘Sinan Antoon’s Notes From a Lost Country is an unexpectedly soulful novel that deepens the more you stay with it. The book’s two protagonists are traumatized, walled-off, and imperfect men, but one of Antoon’s victories is how he makes us want to spend time with them, understand them, and even root them on. If most novels close down as you finish them, this one never stops opening up. Notes From a Lost Country expands into the past of trauma and the possible future of love, between nations, languages, and into the hidden conflicts inside a diaspora. One can think of few other novels that depict the disorientation, buried pasts, and surrealism of migration into an America seen as it truly is.’