Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions Paperbook)

An impressionistic memoir by the award-winning Iraqi-American writer, Dunya Mikhail, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea covers her earliest sensations of childhood to a more complicated grasp of death, beginning with the death of her father to the Gulf War and the subsequent Iraqi War. Mikhail writes: “Death always looks for us. It comes from beyond the continents. It crosses long distances holding a basket of fire in its hand.” The two halves of Mikhail's book merge past and present in a lyrical memoir that moves between memories of her childhood, her father's death, her Iraqi poet-peers and friends, her job as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer, and culminates with the birth of her daughter Larsa. 5 b&w illustrations