Tehran Noir

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller "Brooklyn Noir," Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
The Akashic Noir Ser [...]
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Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller "Brooklyn Noir," Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
The Akashic Noir Series' foray into the Middle East moves unapologetically forward with this gripping collection. Most the writers are still living in Tehran, so this is not the "outsider's perspective" that often characterizes contemporary literature set in Iran.
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.
From the Introduction by Salar Abdoh:
"Tehran is a juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty that breaks the heart. A place where not one but two inept dynasties came to miserable ends, and where, arguably, the third most important revolution in history (after the French and the Russian) was started. It is also the city where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met to divvy up the world while the flames of WWII were still burning. And it was where one of CIA's first manufactured coups (with the prodding and support of the British--who else?) against a democratically elected government was put into motion, thus ushering in years of a dictatorship which in turn was swept aside by the first real fury of fundamentalist Islam, a harbinger of the world we now live in and call post-9/11.
In other words, there is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers 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 with Tehran. 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. The city enforces its own "Morality Police" and there are regular public hangings of drug dealers and thieves. Because of this, there is a raging sense of a split-personality about the place--the imposed propriety of the mosque rubbing against the hidden (and more and more often not so hidden) rhythms of the real city."