After Tehran

Download or read book After Tehran written by Marina Nemat and published by Penguin Canada. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marina Nemat’s bestselling Prisoner of Tehran chronicled her arrest, torture, and two-year imprisonment in the notorious Evin prison as a teenager in 1980s revolutionary Iran. In her new book, Nemat provides a riveting account of her escape from Iran and her journey to Canada, via Hungary, with her husband and infant son in 1991. Settling into a new life as immigrants, she and her husband find jobs, raise their two children, and seemingly adapt. But inwardly, Nemat is struggling. Haunted by survivor’s guilt, she feels compelled to speak out about what happened to her in prison. Her account becomes a bestselling book; and again her life is changed. A story of courage and recovery, After Tehran chronicles Nemat’s confrontation with her past, how she re-engages with her distant father, and how ultimately she emerges from the emotional ravages of posttraumatic stress.

Download or read book Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran written by Gohar Homayounpour and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-09-14 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Western-trained psychoanalyst returns to her homeland and tells stories of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran? This is the question that Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of this memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Twenty years after leaving her country, Homayounpour, an Iranian, Western-trained psychoanalyst, returns to Tehran to establish a psychoanalytic practice. When an American colleague exclaims, “I do not think that Iranians can free-associate!” Homayounpour responds that in her opinion Iranians do nothing but. Iranian culture, she says, revolves around stories. Why wouldn't Freud's methods work, given Iranians' need to talk? Thus begins a fascinating narrative of interlocking stories that resembles—more than a little—a psychoanalytic session. Homayounpour recounts the pleasure and pain of returning to her motherland, her passion for the work of Milan Kundera, her complex relationship with Kundera's Iranian translator (her father), and her own and other Iranians' anxieties of influence and disobedience. Woven throughout the narrative are glimpses of her sometimes frustrating, always candid, sessions with patients. Ms. N, a famous artist, dreams of abandonment and sits in the analyst's chair rather than on the analysand's couch; a young chador-clad woman expresses shame because she has lost her virginity; an eloquently suicidal young man cannot kill himself. As a psychoanalyst, Homayounpour knows that behind every story told is another story that remains untold. Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran connects the stories, spoken and unspoken, that ordinary Iranians tell about their lives before their hour is up.

Download or read book Reading Lolita in Tehran written by Azar Nafisi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2003-12-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

Download or read book Prisoner of Tehran written by Marina Nemat and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows the author's tragic childhood in 1980s Iran, which was shaped by war, the Khomeini regime, and her work as a teen anti-propaganda activist, efforts for which she was brutally beaten and sentenced to death before a guard offered to save her and protect her family if she would convert to Islam and marry him. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

Download or read book Prisoner of Tehran written by Marina Nemat and published by Penguin Canada. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1982, 16-year-old Marina Nemat was arrested on false charges by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and tortured in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. At a time when most Western teenaged girls are choosing their prom dresses, Nemat was having her feet beaten by men with cables and listening to gunshots as her friends were being executed. She survived only because one of the guards fell in love with her and threatened to harm her family if she refused to marry him. Soon after her forced conversion to Islam and marriage, her husband was assassinated by rival factions. Nemat was returned to prison but, ironically, it was her captor's family who eventually secured her release. An extraordinary tale of faith and survival, Prisoner of Tehran is a testament to the power of love in the face of evil and injustice.

Download or read book Persian Dreams written by John W. Parker and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-09 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moscow's ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran underwent dramatic fluctuations following Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's triumphant return to Tehran in 1979. After a prolonged implosion, they fitfully expanded, shaped not only by the rush of current events but by centuries of ingrained practices and prejudices. By summer 2006, as Iran forged ahead with its nuclear program and Shia-based forces flexed their muscles across the Middle East, Russian-Iranian relations again appeared to be on the threshold of an entirely new dynamic. Drawing on firsthand interviews as well as primary and secondary sources, John Parker delineates Moscow's motives and approaches to dealing with the resurgent Tehran, weaving into the public record the recollections and analyses of Russian politicians, diplomats, and experts who dealt directly with Iran both under the Pahlavi monarchy and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Parker also emphasizes other touchstones of relations between the two countries, including their complex dealings in 1992 immediately after the Soviet Union's collapse and when they backed opposing sides in the civil war in Tajikistan yet nourished mutual interests on other issues. The depth of his analysis sheds light on the more recent repercussions of the September 11 terrorist attacks for Afghanistan and Iraq, for the Middle East as a whole, and for Iran's accelerating nuclear program.

Download or read book Tehran Noir written by Salar Abdoh and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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