The Smartest Guy on Facebook

More than two years ago, the Syrian people revolted against the government, which then brutally fought back. At about the same time, 30-year-old Aboud Saeed began his personal revolution on Facebook. His daily status updates have become a literary documentation of his life. 'The Syrian Bukowski.' (Aspekte, TV magazine on the arts in German TV channel ZDF) 'Saeed's Facebook feed is a lot of fun to read. It's quippy and clever and exotic but relatable. ... Saeed is perhaps the world master of humble brag.' (Amanda DeMarco, Readux Reads) Aboud Saeed writes anecdotes, aphorisms, prose poems and commentary. About his mother, smoking, Facebook, love, and daily life during the violent Syrian conflict. Displaying a dark humor in sharing the absurdities of his life, he provides a different and more humane perspective on current events in his country than all the news and reports that usually reach us.

Aboud Saeed was born in 1983 and lives in the township of Manbij, in the province of Aleppo in northern Syria. Manbij was heavily bombed by the current provincial government in 2012 and early 2013. Aboud Saeed lives with his mother and seven siblings in one room in a small house. After the ninth grade, he left school, and trained to be a smith and welder. For the past 11 years, he's worked in a workshop. For three years he was a foreign worker in a plastic factory in Lebanon, where he lived in a tin shack. In 2008, he received a high school equivalency diploma, and enrolled in a university to study economics. The university is currently closed due to the political situation. In 2009 Saeed created a Facebook account and posted there every day. The Smartest Guy on Facebook, a selection of his status updates, in which he writes about his mother, smoking, Facebook, love, and daily life during the violent Syrian conflict, is his first book. The Lebanese newspaper Annahar wrote of him in late December 2012, 'Going on Facebook without getting to know Aboud Saeed is like traveling to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower.'

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