Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

SEASONS OF PURGATORY

Shahriar Mandanipour

The first English-language story collection from "one of Iran's most important living fiction writers" (Guardian)

In SEASONS OFPURGATORY, 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. Shahriar Mandanipour is an award-winning, exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction has been published throughout the world, including two acclaimed novels published in English. He lives in California.

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Book Published 2022-01-25 by Bellvue LIterary Press

Comments

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.

Seasons of Purgatory is the lead title in a Book Riot feature Read more...

Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture - not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it.

Seasons of Purgatory is not an uplifting book of short stories. Many are quite jarring, discombobulating, and challenging to read. But they are necessary. Read more...

Translated into lush English prose by Sara Khalili, [Mandanipour] mixes messy modern politics with the dreamlike intensity of myth.

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. Read more...

Escher-like... Kundera-like... [Mandanipour] build[s] a clever Rubik's Cube of a story, while at the same time giving readers a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran: arduous, demoralizing and constricted.

Save Yourself: On Shahriar Mandanipour's "Seasons of Purgatory" Read more...