At night, the scent of Poet’s Jasmine woke me up.
We slept outdoors, on wooden beds arranged next to the 12-foot deep fish pool with statues of silver-skinned dolphins that spat water into the air when the fountain was turned on. Tehran’s summers were dry and brutal. At mid-day, the heat melted the asphalt on the [...]
Where I live now the walls are painted green and yellow and ocean blue. The ceilings are high, the rooms forever inundated with light. There are rose bushes in the yard, and bougainvillea, and a lemon tree I once planted by mistake, not knowing what it was or whether it would grow, and which surprises [...]
Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood, A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a Muslim World, Taslima Nasrin, Translated from the Bengali by Gopa Majumdar, Steerforth Press: 308 pp., $26
Less than a decade ago, Muslim clerics in Bangladesh issued a series of fatwas against a 31-year-old woman who had written a novel they found offensive. The woman, [...]
Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews, edited by Houman Sarshar. The Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History/ The Jewish Publication Society: 458 pp., $110
In his introduction to “Esther’s Children,” editor Houman Sarshar speaks of a time when, 6 years old and about to start elementary school, he discovered his legacy as an Iranian Jew. [...]
A writer on a book tour finds the city’s ’serious’ literary community to be less than genuine.
I’m not one of those writers who routinely predict the demise of the written word, feel ignored by their publishers or lament the possibility that their books may be read by the huddled masses. The written word, I believe, [...]
I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters by Rabih Alameddine. W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $23.95
Rabih Alameddine’s new novel unfolds like a secret, guarded too long, which is at last pushing toward the light: It moves in jagged lines, flows forward and backward andsideways. It grows by bits and pieces, each one as thrilling, as [...]
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