Tehran Noir
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Crime fiction set in Iran—including a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best PI Short Story.
"Tehran Noir is not only a solid crime collection, but an illuminating look into day-to-day life in the Middle East, with religious and political implications galore, as well as racial tensions bubbling just beneath the surface. . . . The stories in Tehran Noir aren't always easy to read, but they are engaging in the extreme." —San Francisco Book Review
Includes brand-new stories by Gina B. Nahai, Salar Abdoh, Lily Farhadpour, Azardokht Bahrami, Yourik Karim-Masihi, Vali Khalili, Farhaad Heidari Gooran, Aida Moradi Ahani, Mahsa Mohebali, Majed Neisi, Danial Haghighi, Javad Afhami, Sima Saeedi, Mahak Taheri, and Hossein Abkenar.
"A stellar and diverse cast of Iranian writers. . . . A collection such as this is able to bring Iran to life for the foreign reader in a way other fiction and non-fiction cannot. . . . Superb." —PopMatters
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This entry in Akashic's noir series takes the gritty sensibilities born out of American film and fiction to Tehran. When you encounter the sentence "I'd been to my share of rough teahouses" in Vali Khalili's "Fear Is the Best Keeper of Secrets," you'll know that you're no longer in noir's home environs. Still, even in Tehran the genre reveals the same venalities, faults, and occasional nobility of humanity. The 15 stories contain much that's bleak, tawdry, or outright crude, with the rape of a mullah with a shovel handle in Majed Neisi's "The Corpse Fixer" being the most extreme example. Yourik Karim-Masihi's "Bridge of Simon" is a quiet tragedy, while Hossein Abkenar's "Not Every Bullet Is Meant for a King" is a kaleidoscopic tale of lives on a collision course. In his introduction, Abdoh characterizes Tehran as "a juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty that breaks the heart," which has "something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful" about it. Readers will agree.
