Bo Hamby and Simone Popperl produced and edited this interview for broadcast at NPR. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
The novelist and poet Sinan Antoon grew up in Baghdad, Iraq — a city that’s known many years of sorrow.
He was born to an Iraqi father and an American mother, and lived there until 1991. That was the year of the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he hid in the basement of a restaurant as U.S. bombs fell.
Antoon later moved to New York. But after the United States bombed …

Published by Arab News, June 18th
Out of Baghdad comes “The Book of Collateral Damage” (Fihris, or Index), by internationally celebrated author Sinan Antoon, whose fourth novel follows the life of introspective academic Nameer Al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi living in the US. An encounter in Baghdad with an eccentric bookseller while travelling with documentary filmmakers as a translator leads Nameer to a manuscript that forces him to explore memories of the past, the loss of his home and the destruction caused by war.

Published by Philip Jenkins for The Christian Century, June 29, 2018

Sinan Antoon is a star of modern Arab fiction, a multiply honored novelist whose books address critical questions of identity, memory, and history. He has an Iraqi Christian background but teaches at New York Univer­sity—a dislocation that resembles that of so many Middle Eastern Chris­tians in recent years. Antoon’s most recently translated novel, The Baghdad Eucha­rist, offers Westerners an unparalleled opportunity to understand these events. The book traces the historic catastrophe that has overcome—and is now uprooting—one of the world’s oldest Chris­tian communities.

Published by World Literature Today, September 2017
Sinan Antoon’s novel, Baghdad Eucharist, translated by Maia Tabet, originally published in Arabic by Al-Kamel Publishers and shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013, is a visceral yet poetic novel about the Iraqi diaspora.

Published by Asian Review of Books, May 13, 2017
Baghdad is not a city readily associated with Christianity. Nevertheless, a small (and shrinking) community lives there. This brief but resonant novel describes the discrimination and abuse they suffer for their faith as well as offering an important insight into how intolerance (of any religion or lifestyle, not just Christianity) can escalate into violence and even war.

Published by Qantara, June 7, 2017
In his novel ″The Baghdad Eucharist″, Iraqi author Sinan Antoon probes deeply into the nature of loss and its impact on collective memory. Intertwining two distinct threads, he teases the reader to reach a conclusion about a community on the edge. Marcia Lynx Qualey read the book.