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The Other Rooms

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In The Other Rooms, acclaimed Palestinian-Iraqi writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra crafts a haunting modernist tale set in an unnamed city where nothing is what it seems. When an unnamed man is whisked from an empty city square into a nightmarish compound, he is plunged into a world of shadowy rooms, shifting identities, erotic entanglements, and elusive truths. As he is forced to lecture on a book he never wrote and assume names he doesnt recognize, the boundaries between reality and illusion collapse.

 

Written during the darkest years of Iraqs authoritarian era, The Other Rooms is a gripping allegory of state surveillance, intellectual repression, and the psychological toll of life under tyranny. With echoes of Kafka and Beckett, this is Jabra at his most experimental and unflinching-a visionary work of Arabic modernism that resonates powerfully today.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-1994) was a Palestinian-Iraqi novelist, poet, translator, and painter, widely regarded as one of the most influential modernist writers in Arabic literature. Jabra studied in Jerusalem and later at Cambridge and Harvard, eventually settling in Baghdad after the 1948 Nakba.
A true polymath, Jabra was instrumental in shaping modern Arabic fiction and literary criticism. He authored several acclaimed novels, including Hunters in a Narrow Street, In Search of Walid Masoud, and The Ship. His works often explore themes of exile, identity, and cultural alienation, and are known for their experimental narrative techniques.
Jabra also played a crucial role in introducing Western literature to the Arab world through his translations of Shakespeare, William Faulkner, and others.
He died in Baghdad in 1994, leaving behind a rich and enduring legacy in Arabic literature and thought.

"A modernist masterpiece... a claustrophobic and poetic vision of Arab disillusionment." - BASHIR ABU-MANNEH

 

"Jabras novel disorients, entraps, and illuminates-revealing the surreal absurdities of authoritarian life." - WILLIAM TAMPLIN, TRANSLATOR

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