Shahriar Mandanipour

In September 2011, Mandanipour returned to Brown University as a visiting literary arts professor, teaching contemporary Persian literature and modern Iranian cinema.

Regarded as one of the most accomplished and promising writers of contemporary Iranian literature, Mandanipour's creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time, and space, as well as his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers alike.

Yet, they jolt awake the reader's imagination and provoke him or her to peel away the intricately woven and fused layers in which past, present, tradition, and modernity collide.

Often driven by the most basic human instincts of fear, survival, and loneliness, Mandanipour's characters struggle in a world of contradictions and ambiguities and grapple with self-identity, social dilemmas, and everyday life.

In a collection of essays on creative writing, The Book of Shahrzad's Ghosts (Ketab-e Arvāh-e Shahrzād), Mandanipour discusses the elements of the story and the novel, as well as his theories on the nature of literature and the secrets of fiction.

Mandanipour compares the devastation, savagery, futility, and dark consequences of war and earthquakes by placing the two timeframes laterally, like mirrors facing each other.

In one, we read of the difficulties, fears, and trepidations that surround the meeting of a young couple in modern-day Iran at a time when gender separation is forcefully imposed on society.

In a parallel storyline, Mandanipour enters as his alter ego and takes us along as he composes each sentence and scene, revealing his frustrations and his methods of battling against censorship.

In his review for The New Yorker, James Wood wrote, "Mandanipour's writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references.

"[2] For The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote, "Some of Mr. Mandanipour's efforts to inject his story with surreal, postmodern elements feel distinctly strained (the intermittent appearances of a hunchbacked midget, in particular, are annoyingly gratuitous and contrived), but he's managed, by the end of the book, to build a clever Rubik's Cube of a story, while at the same time giving readers a haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran: arduous, demoralizing and constricted even before the brutalities of the current crackdown."