Seasons of Purgatory

(Paperback)

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST

The first English-language story collection from one of Irans most important living fiction writers (Guardian), a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran (Wall Street Journal)

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. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

Reviews

National Book Award Longlist
Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year selection
Library Journal Best Books of the Year selection
World Literature Today Notable Translations of the Year selection

Mandanipour served as a frontline officer in the Iran-Iraq war: a writers baptism of fire whose flames light up several stories here. . . . Seasons of Purgatory unites storytelling subtlety with scenes of visceral emotional impact. Wall Street Journal

A hauntingly nuanced and provocatively impressive collection. World Literature Today

Cause for celebration. . . . Mandanipour provides readers with a vivid and idiosyncratic map of [Irans] people and places, effortlessly translated by Sara Khalili whose close collaboration with the author is palpable on every gleaming, blade-sharp page. Chicago Review of Books

Read[s] like dispatches from the front. . . . [Mandanipour] sifts through military conflict, the repression of women, the forbidden graves of the state-executed, and the shattered minds of children. Storytelling and remembering are subversive acts when power benefits from forgetting. Los Angeles Review of Books

Bewitching and disorienting. . . . Mandanipour has been compared to Milan Kundera and to the artist M.C. Escher for the way his fictions require the reader to put them together like a puzzle. . . . The stories in Seasons of Purgatory are stunning. Washington Independent Review of Books

Each mesmerizing story . . . put[s] us into a state of disequilibrium in a way that highlights the complexities of the human experience in the fallout of war and revolution. Litro Magazine

Enchanting, unnerving, and resonant. . . . The prose is beautiful, the characters feel real, and the situations they find themselves in are haunting. Shelf Unbound

Mandanipour respects his reader by esteeming resonance over facile moralism or plot-shock. . . . The psyche in his stories gnaws at an actual world and eludes purgatory for the moment by giving that world an obsessively resonant sound, rendered with a keen ear for urgency and strife by translator Sara Khalili. On the Seawall

Stunning. . . . Deserves a much wider readership. Literary Hub

Rich with enigma, asking to be read, then read again. Full Stop

A scorchingly beautiful collection in elegant, icepick-sharp prose. Library Journal (starred review)

While the turmoil and danger of everyday life in Iran are the backdrop, Mandanipour focuses on the personal struggles of the characters and their hardscrabble lives. . . . These haunting, urgent works are as nuanced and provocative as the lives they depict. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A stunning collection of stories about Irans traditions, its violent recent history, and how the memory of both influences daily life. Foreword Reviews (starred review)

Dostoyevskian in their density and black humor, Mandanipours 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. Booklist

Altogether subversive. . . . [Mandanipour is] a skilled storyteller with a bent for the quietly macabre and the burdens of those crushed by totalitarian rule. Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

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 and the story collection Seasons of Purgatory. In 2006, Mandanipour moved to the United States, where he became a citizen in 2021. He has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, and Boston College and has taught at Brown University and Tufts University. He lives in California.