The Competition of Unfinished Stories

Overview

Reviews

"[D]ryly funny, delightfully inventive, and politically sharp . . . If you like Rabih Alameddine's style, this is a great book for you!" —Samia Saliba, Arab American Writers

"A breathtaking, virtuosic, dark, funny, furious, sad, and genuinely strange work of fiction. It's a book that twists and soars and obfuscates while transmitting its images and ideas with absolute clarity." —Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
 

"The narrative of The Competition of Unfinished Stories isn’t limited to the paragraphs that line these pages. Readers will find a number of very opinionated footnotes, which in turn give a sense of the free-associative elements of the protagonist’s train of thought. (One example: ‘All mechanics are crooks. Not a one will see the gates of Heaven.’) A series of endnotes continue this mood, creating a sense of irreverence even as the stakes for the novel’s protagonist increase." —Words Without Borders

"With equal parts starkness and absurdity, incision and humor, The Competition of Unfinished Stories illustrates that when even the most banal facts of life—the letters of the alphabet, the diacritic over a name—become sites of battle, all the matter of reality must confront and interrogate its own fictionization." —Hilary Ilkay, Asymptote Journal

"The novel feels like a fever dream narrated by someone who refuses to be oppressed into sanity. Scenes oscillate between brutal realism and fantastical hallucination." —Ibrahim Fawzy

"This is an unusual, wildly inventive novel, written with gusto and lashings of Kurdish gallows humour . . . Nicholas Glastonbury’s translation is vivid and evocative." —Alan Ali Saeed, Asian Review of Books

Author Biography