We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do. — Elliott Colla Copy Share Image
In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference. — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays. — Elliott Colla Copy Share
In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, friendly with the Communists, and… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics. — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis. — Elliott Colla Copy Share
Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds… — Elliott Colla Copy Share
There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. — Elliott Colla Copy Share
