Censoring an Iranian Love Story »

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. He is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in PEN America, The Literary Review, and The Kenyon Review.
 
Visit the author's website at www.mandanipour.net.

From one of Iran s most acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers, his first novel to appear in English a dazzlingly inventive work of fiction that opens a revelatory window onto what it s like to live, to love, and to be an artist in today s Iran.

The novel entwines two equally powerful narratives. A writer named Shahriar the author s fictional alter ego has struggled for years against the all-powerful censor at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Now, on the threshold of fifty, tired of writing dark and bitter stories, he has come to realize that the world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow. He sets out instead to write a bewitching love story, one set in present-day Iran. It may be his greatest challenge yet.

Beautiful black-haired Sara and fiercely proud Dara fall in love in the dusty stacks of the library, where they pass secret messages to each other encoded in...

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour - an Iranian writer who is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard - is, at once, a novel about two young Iranians trying to conduct a covert romance in Tehran; a postmodern account of the efforts of their creator - or his fictional alter ego - to grapple with the harsh censorship rules of his homeland; and an Escher-like meditation on the interplay of life and art, reality and fiction.