Outcast

Feature stories on Ballas and the younger Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon, also published this season by City Lights. New Yorker excerpt. Spring 2007 NYU event with Ballas, Elias Khoury and others

"Tells more about Iraq than many commentaries being offered up these days." --Le MondeHaroun Soussan, narrator of Outcast and a Jewish convert to Islam, is a civil engineer and historian who's just completed his life's work, The Jews and History. The book opens with him getting an award from Saddam Hussein during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. Written in the form of an autobiography, the narrative moves in and out of the present, the recent, and more distant past, providing a unique and intimate chronicle of Iraq's contemporary political history. Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad in 1930 and immigrated to Israel in 1951.