What to Read Before Your Trip to Atropia

“Pastoralia,” the title story in this collection, is about two people who work in a theme park, pretending to be cavemen. Like in “Atropia,” the main character is completely obsessed with maintaining authenticity, and is deeply frustrated by his co-worker, who is always breaking character, and by the inanity of the visitors who come and don’t really appreciate the prowess involved in his work. There are also corporate overlords, who are never seen.

My favorite detail from the story has to do with the fact that the cavemen-actors are supposed to roast goats, which sometimes appear and sometimes don’t—it’s up to the overlords—and the main character in the story finds it much easier to fret over the goat not being in the slot than to deal with real life beyond the simulation.

The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

by Hassan Blasim

I think, because of the title, this book runs the risk of being misunderstood as very heavy. It definitely deals with the heaviest of subjects—death, war, betrayal. But it also has a gallows humor to end all gallows humor. The titular story is about an assassin who is having an extremely bureaucratic exchange with a recruit, explaining to him how best to arrange a tableau of dead bodies for maximum aesthetic effect. It’s chilling and hilarious—it reminds me slightly of the terrific Colombian mockumentary “The Vampires of Poverty.”

My favorite story in the collection is “The Green Zone Rabbit,” which is about these two young men who are crashing in a mansion in the green zone, and has a kind of “Waiting for Godot” quality to it. One of them begins to treat a rabbit as a pet, and eventually it lays an egg and the men freak out. It captures the eeriness of having an uncertain future in a place that has become totally lawless, and it also has a surrealism that turns out not to be totally surreal, which is something I wanted for my film, too.

Written on the Wall

by Shaun Lewis

This book is a collection of photographs of musings that were scrawled on porta-potty walls in Iraq, taken by a soldier during his deployment in 2004 and 2005. I think porta-potties had a kind of mythical status in the Iraq War, because these were the only places where soldiers had any alone time, and, because of that, could become places of pleasure and contemplation. The graffiti here includes extremely detailed drawings of sex acts and records of people coming out and cries of help and even poetry. Some of the most charming moments are when somebody has added a rebuttal to something. In one picture, someone has written “I wish I was where I was when I wished I was here.” Next to it, someone has scratched the words “Lil Bitch.” There’s more serious stuff, too—we put one in the movie that reads “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, die for the ungrateful.” I wouldn’t say that the photography itself is meaningful or artful, but it’s an amazing collection of documents that, taken together, create a holistic portrait of that era.