Censoring an Iranian Love Story - by Shahriar Mandanipour (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - "One of Iran's most important living fiction writers" (The Guardian) shows what it's like to live and love there today.

"A haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran." --The New York Times

In a country where mere proximity between a man and a woman may be the prologue to deadly sin, where illicit passion is punished by imprisonment, or even death, telling that most redemptive of human narratives becomes the greatest literary challenge. If conducting a love affair in modern Iran is not a simple undertaking, then telling the story of that love may be even more difficult.

Shahriar Mandanipour (author of Moon Brow) evokes a pair of young lovers who find each other--despite surreal persecution and repressive parents--through coded messages and internet chat rooms; and triumphantly their story entwines with an account of their creator's struggle. Inventive, darkly comic and profoundly touching, Censoring an Iranian Love Story celebrates both the unquenchable power of the written word and a love that is doomed, glorious, and utterly real.

Review Quotes

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
One of the Best Debuts of 2009 --NPR

"Exciting. . . . Powerful. . . . Mandanipour's writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references." --James Wood, The New Yorker

"A clever Rubik's Cube of a story, [and] a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. . . . An Escher-like meditation on the interplay of life and art, reality and fiction. . . . At its best, Censoring an Iranian Love Story becomes a Kundera-like rumination on philosophy and politics [that] playfully investigates the possibilities and limits of storytelling." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A love story that is convincingly, achingly impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each other in public. The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is deliriously sensual prose. . . . Mandanipour has triumphed." --Los Angeles Times

"Wry, playful. . . . Reminiscent of Milan Kundera, this is a lively account of life and letters in contemporary Iran." --Financial Times

"In this brilliantly conceived and cleverly written novel, characters and author together and separately act and write with sly purpose, disguising and disavowing their subversive ends--to live, love, and create in today's repressive Iranian society." --The Boston Globe

"Devious and engaging. . . . A droll, even cheerful portrait of totalitarian craziness." --Bloomberg News

"Not your typical love story. . . . A meditation on culture, modern Iran, and the power of what is left out. . . . By the end of this witty, hyper-intelligent riff on life under a repressive regime, the writer has demonstrated the mental and emotional contortions necessary to survive." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Telling amorous tales in post-Islamic-revolution Iran is tricky, if not downright dangerous, but [Mandanipour] is up to the task. . . . And as much as humor dominates the book, it quietly gets at something else--the omnipotence of tyranny." --The Miami Herald

"A very special novel--a passionate, inventive and humorous exposure of the stupidity and cruelty of a society ruled by fear." --The Times (London)

"Neither sentimental nor nostalgic, romanticized nor demonized. Looking at his country and its inhabitants through a fiction writer's authentic spectacles, Mandanipour has written a novel that is witty, smart, funny, and honest. It is an important book for our times." --Rabih Alameddine, author of The Hakawati

"Rich and riveting." --The Irish Times

"A brilliant novel about the complexities of writing and publishing in Iran. It will help to further understanding of the frustrating and sometimes perilous situation of the book industry in a country where copyright is not respected, where writers struggle desperately to publish and can be jailed simply for exercising their imaginations." --The Guardian (London)

About the Author

Shahriar Mandanipour has won numerous awards for his novels, short stories, and nonfiction in Iran, although he was unable to publish his fiction from 1992 until 1997 as a result of censorship. He came to the United States in 2006 as the third International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. His work has appeared in PEN America, The Literary Review, and The Kenyon Review.

www.mandanipour.net