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The first English-language story collection from 'one of Iran's most important living fiction writers' (Guardian).
In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.
"Mandanipour skillfully fuses the poetic and the brutal in this complex and intense collection. The care and humanity of his voice adds poignancy to plots anchored by violence...Prolific in Iran though relatively new to U.S. readers, this author deserves greater attention." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A stunning collection of stories about Iran's traditions, its violent recent history, and how the memory of both influences daily life." - Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"[S]ubversive...[Mandanipour is a] skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule." - Kirkus Reviews
"Dostoyevskian in their density and black humor, Mandanipour's stories capture the Iranian experience of constant upheaval in a brilliant translation that allows the English-speaking world to experience this gem of Iranian literature." - Booklist
This information about Seasons of Purgatory was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Elena Seibert
Shahriar Mandanipour is a novelist and essayist in modern Persian literature. He was born and raised in Shiraz. In 1975 he moved to Tehran and studied Political Sciences at Tehran University, graduating in 1980. In 1981, he enlisted in the army for his military service. To experience war and to write about it, he volunteered to join the front during the Iran-Iraq war and served there as an officer for eighteen months.
He came to the United States in 2006 as the third International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. He 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 is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
... Full Biography
Link to Shahriar Mandanipour's Website
Name Pronunciation
Shahriar Mandanipour: shehr-EE-ahr man-DAN-ee-poor
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