No Windmills in Basra
A bold, imaginative collection of short stories set in Southern Iraq from prolific, award-winning novelist Diaa Jubaili.
Influenced in turn by the long tradition of Arabic folktales and the magical realism of Latin America, the stories in No Windmills in Basra reflect a reality tinged by the city’s history with war. Yet the fantastic and playful peek through, offering an astounding breadth of images in only a few lines per story. In “Mubarak,” a security guard for a chicken plant discovers his own wings after a bomb explosion. In “The Taste of Death,” long-buried Iraqi and Iranian soldiers rise from their unmarked graves, dissatisfied with the landscape’s returning verdancy. Set in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where the author still lives, these fleeting stories oscillate between whimsy and tragedy.
Diaa Jubaili was born in 1977 in Basra, Iraq, where he still lives. He is the author of eight novels, including The Curse of the Marquis, which won the Dubai Magazine Award, and three short story collections, including What Will We Do Without Calvino?, winner of the Tayeb Salih International Award for Creative Writing, and No Windmills in Basra, winner of the Almultaqa Prize for the Short Story. He was a contributor to the short story collection Iraq +100 and has written for the Guardian.
Chip Rossetti has a Ph.D. in modern Arabic literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and wrote his dissertation on the contemporary Iraqi writer Muhammad Khudayyir. His published translations include the novel Beirut, Beirut by Sonallah Ibrahim; the graphic novel Metro: A Story of Cairo by Magdy El Shafee; and Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. His translations have also appeared in Asymptote, The White Review, Banipal, and Words Without Borders. He has worked in book publishing for over twenty years, and is currently the Editorial Director for the Library of Arabic Literature at New York University Press.
