Liquid A Love Story

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 

Two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator of Liquid stand achingly far from the middle-class comfort promised by her education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, her best friend, Adam, suggests she just marry rich. Taking this challenge seriously, armed with a spreadsheet, she sets off on a whirlwind summer of one hundred dates with rich Angelenos/as.

But when a family emergency takes her to Tehran, it's a queer love interest and the possibility of a very different future that sustains her attention; now she must confront the contradictions of her life and decide which path she wants to follow.

Exploding off the page with verve and originality, Liquid delivers a modern dating tale like no other. 

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction and essays have recently appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, and the Los Angeles Times’ Image Magazine, and her translation in n+1 and Columbia Journal. Her first book-length translation, of the contemporary Iranian cult hit novel In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, was well reviewed in The New Yorker and The New York Times and named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker. Her awards include an American Council for Learned Societies fellowship and a US Fulbright grant. She holds a PhD from UCLA and an MFA from Columbia, as well as degrees from Princeton and Oxford. She currently serves on the faculty of Bennington College.