Elliott Colla

When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

— Elliott Colla

There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently…

— Elliott Colla

So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming…

— Elliott Colla

The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

— Elliott Colla

The stories that confirm that bigger story are brought in and easily digested. But there's another set of stories that are always…

— Elliott Colla

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding…

— Elliott Colla

I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has…

— Elliott Colla

We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in…

— Elliott Colla

Just as certain Cold War binaries were collapsing, new binaries of Sunni versus Shia or Arab versus Kurd were being created by…

— Elliott Colla

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

— Elliott Colla

The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot…

— Elliott Colla

Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and…

— Elliott Colla

In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what…

— Elliott Colla

Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or…

— Elliott Colla

I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction.…

— Elliott Colla

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know…

— Elliott Colla