Competition of Unfinished Stories

<P>"[D]ryly funny, delightfully inventive, and politically sharp . . . If you like Rabih Alameddine's style, this is a great book for you!" —<B>Samia Saliba, Arab American Writers</B><br><br>"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." —<B>Lydia Kiesling, author of </B><I><B>Mobility</B></I><br> </P><P>"The narrative of <I>The Competition of Unfinished Stories</I> 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." —<I><B>Words Without Borders</B></I></P><P>"With equal parts starkness and absurdity, incision and humor, <I>The Competition of Unfinished Stories</I> 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." —<B>Hilary Ilkay, </B><I><B>Asymptote Journal</B></I></P><P>"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." —<B>Ibrahim Fawzy</B></P><P>"This is an unusual, wildly inventive novel, written with gusto and lashings of Kurdish gallows humour . . . Nicholas Glastonbury’s translation is vivid and evocative." —<B>Alan Ali Saeed, </B><I><B>Asian Review of Books</B></I></P>