Showing results for "Tehran" in Literature & Fiction

A 17-year-old boy finds his rooftop the perfect escape for taking in the night sky, smoking cigarettes and catching occasional glimpses of his beautiful neighbor. But when his lofty perch allows him to witness the brutality of the regime under which he lives, everything changes for the boy and those close to him.

Téhéran, 1953. Pour leur fille, les parents de Roya veulent le meilleur : ils l'inscrivent dans le meilleur lycée de la capitale, espérant bien faire d'elle la future Marie Curie de ce monde. Une savante, une intellectuelle, une femme capable de changer le cours de l'histoire. Après ses cours, la jeune fille fréquente régulièrement la librairie de M. Fakhri, où elle trouve de quoi étancher sa soif de poésie persane et de littérature étrangère. C'est là qu'elle va faire connaissance de Bahman, jeune activiste politique, bien décidé à changer le monde.

A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an average girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in love, but when her family discover his letters, they accuse her of bringing them dishonor. She is badly beaten by her brother, and her parents hastily arrange for her to marry a man she has never met. Facing a life without love and the prospect of no education, Massoumeh is distraught, but a female neighbor urges her to comply: “We each have a destiny, and you can’t fight yours.”

There is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran's case is no different - except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic.

Raised in Tehran but torn between two worlds, Ricardo’s young life is thrown into chaos when his American father abandons the family just as the Islamic Revolution of 1979 breaks out. As fundamental human rights are washed away in a tide of religious, anti-Western fanaticism, Ricardo’s mother remarries, introducing a stepfather with a dark secret.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid. 1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

This generations-spanning novel carries one extraordinary family to the brink of the Iranian Revolution--and marks the debut of a literary talent to watch As a child living in his family's apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather's every mesmerizing...

In the style of Alan Furst, this suspenseful thriller - based on real events - places an idealistic American diplomat in a turbulent, US-hating Tehran in the days leading up to the Iranian Revolution. Backed by the CIA, and trailed by a beautiful and engaging French journalist he suspects is a spy, David Weiseman’s mission is to ease the Shah of Iran out of power and find the best alternative between the military, religious extremists, and the political ruling class - many of whom are simultaneously trying to kill him.

When radical Iranian students seize the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran and take over fifty diplomats hostage, the U.S. President has to negotiate with a government that wants only to humiliate the United States. When talks fail, the President must turn to the military to bring the Americans home by force.

LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER A spellbinding debut novel about the trailblazing Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who defied society’s expectations to find her voice and her destiny “A complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people, a reminder of the...

In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present-day Iran provides a rare insight into this rich culture alive with artistic expression but virtually unknown to most Americans. Blending in firsthand glimpses of her own life from childhood memories in 1960s Shiraz to her present life as a professor in America, Keshavarz paints a portrait of Iran depicting both cultural depth and intellectual complexity.