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One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2020. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. "Finely wrought, a master class in the layering of time and contradiction that gives us a deeply imagined, and deeply human, soul." --Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review From the bestselling author of The Septembers of Shiraz, the story of an Iranian man reckoning with his capacity for love and evil Set in Iran and New York City, Man of My Time tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world around him. After decades of ambivalent work as an interrogator with the Iranian regime, Hamid travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where ...
Set in Tehran during the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, this understated, beautifully told literary debut follows the Amin family as they cope with their father's false imprisonment.
The story of a young girl and her family, at the core of an exploration of Iranian history. WINNER: Prix du Style, Prix de la Porte Dorée, Lire Best Debut Novel, Le Prix du Roman News. Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five, with a new life and the prospect of a child, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which reach her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them. In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph. Yet it is Kimiâ herself—punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own “disorientalization”—who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel.
This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, André Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror — whether state or non-state, external or homegrown — shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.
Informed by firsthand experience on the battlefronts of Iraq and Syria, Abdoh captures the horror, confusion, and absurdity of combat from a seldom-glimpsed perspective that expands our understanding of the war novel.
Moving from the elegant drawing rooms of Lahore to the mud villages of rural Multan, a powerful collection of short stories about feudal Pakistan. An impoverished young woman becomes a wealthy relative’s mistress; an electrician on the make confronts his desperate assailant to protect his most prized possession; a farm manager rises far in the world—but his family discovers after his death the transience of power; a maid, who advances herself through sexual favours, unexpectedly falls in love. In these linked stories about the family and household staff of the ageing KK Harouni, we meet masters and servants, landlords and supplicants, politicians and electricians, village women, and Karachi housewives. Part Chekhov, part RK Narayan, these stories are dark and light, complex and humane; at heart about the relationship between the powerful and powerless, bound together in life—and in death. Together they make up a vivid portrait of a feudal world rarely brought alive in the English language. Sensuous, graceful, melancholy, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders gives you Pakistan as you have never seen it. It marks the debut of an amazing new talent.
In the remote forests of Mauritius, young Raj is almost oblivious of the Second World War raging beyond his tiny exotic island. With only his mother for company while his father works as a prison guard, solitary ever since his brothers died years ago, Raj thinks only of making friends. One day, the far-away world comes to Mauritius, and Raj meets David, a Jew exiled from his home in Europe and imprisoned in the camp where Raj's father works. David becomes the friend that he has always longed for, a brother to replace those he has lost. Raj knows that he must help David to escape. As they flee through sub-tropical landscapes and devastating storms, the boys battle hunger and malaria - and forge a friendship only death can destroy. The Last Brother is a powerful, poetic novel that sheds new light on a little-explored aspect of 20th-century history.
The gripping and elegiac stories of eight lost books, and the mysterious circumstances behind their disappearances They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction. Yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them. This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books. Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the H...
In a world of spycraft, betrayals, and reversals, a Stasi officer is unraveled by the cruel system he served and by the revelation of a decades-old secret, in this “story that John le Carré might have written for The Twilight Zone” (Washington Post). On November 9, 1989, Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi officer in the twilight of his career, is deteriorating from a mysterious illness. Alarmed by the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his regular café with whom he is obsessed, he chases a series of clues throughout Berlin. The details of Lara’s vanishing trigger flashbacks to his entanglement with Johannes Held, a physicist who, twenty-five years earlier, infiltrated an American research...
This anthology brings together twenty-seven authors from a wide range of experiences that offer new perspectives on the Iranian American story. Altogether, the narratives capture the diversity of the Iranian diaspora and complicate the often-narrow view of Iranian culture represented in the media. The stories and novel excerpts explore the deeply human experiences of one of the newest immigrant groups to the United States in its attempts to adjust and assimilate in the face of major historical upheavals.