Censoring an Iranian Love Story

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. 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. Shahriar Mandanipour 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 creatorrs"s struggle. Inventive, darkly comic and profoundly touching,Censoring an Iranian Love Storycelebrates both the unquenchable power of the written word and a love that is doomed, glorious, and utterly real.

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 and The Literary Review and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review.


From the Hardcover edition.