Friday, July 4, 2008 
In her first children’s book, Grow, Watermelon, Grow, New York-based Iranian designer/illustrator Charlotte Noruzi uses both Western and Iranian themes to tell a story from her childhood. The resulting work is bright, cheerful drawings about a little girl who insists on growing her own watermelon.
Because much of the book relies on an elegant mix of […]
Filed under: ART, BOOKS, DESIGN, INTERVIEWS, INTERVIEWS WITH YOUNG IRANIANS
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Shahrnush Parsipur is arguably one of the most important Iranian writers working today. First published when she was just sixteen years old, much of her writing casts a spotlight on the lives of women, in a style that combines frank language with magical realism. Parsipur has been jailed under both the Shah’s regime and that […]
Filed under: BOOKS, CENSORSHIP, INTERVIEWS, WOMEN
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Renowned Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur recently published an e-book, Men from Various Civilizations. It’s forty pages long and costs just $3, making it a perfect last-minute gift for the literary Iranian in your life - just buy and download it from Parsipur’s website, print it on some high-quality paper, and you’re done. If you’re feeling […]
Filed under: BOOKS, INTERNET, WOMEN
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Persepolis may be the most highly anticipated film in the Iranian community since 300 (and we all know how well that went). The critically acclaimed animated feature, based on the autobiographical comics by Marjane Satrapi, will probably not incite protest when it opens in Los Angeles and New York on Christmas Day this year, though.
I […]
Filed under: ART, BOOKS, EVENTS, FILM
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Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects is the first great Iranian-American novel, breathless and overwhelmingly good. Its protagonist, Xerxes Adam, Iranian immigrant and son of Iranian immigrants Darius and Lala (nee Laleh) - whose relationship with his father is broken, who is lost in his vague notions of homeland - awkwardly and uncomfortably grows […]
Filed under: BOOKS, EVENTS, INTERVIEWS, INTERVIEWS WITH YOUNG IRANIANS
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Finally! A novel about Iranians in America that sounds like it might speak to/for young diaspora Iranians. No offense to all the memoirists and other fiction writers who are putting out quality work… I just think it’s time to work through and then set aside the collective post-revolutionary loss, anger, and sadness and figure out […]
Filed under: BOOKS
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Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is described in one bio as “the most prominent Iranian novelist of the 1980s” and in another as “one of the first Iranian writers of fiction to support himself primarily by writing.” Before he became a writer, he was a stage and film actor in Tehran, where he still lives. Before […]