Iran

Saturday, May 04, 2013, 7:00pm
The Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10003

Shahrnush Parsipur’s writing career began in 1974 with the publication of her first novel, The Dog and the Long Winter. She's been in trouble with Iranian authorities ever since. Today, with more than twenty novels, short story collections, and translations under her belt, Parsipur lives in California. While she has always written in Persian and her fiction has always been about Iran, Parsipur does not consider herself to be a writer in exile.

President Barack Obama and his national security team are no doubt making final preparations for the upcoming trip to Israel. Obama already began to lay the groundwork for his trip by sending messages to the Israeli leadership who remain fanatically wed to coercing the United States to go to war with Iran. And it seems the coercion is working. The president's message had nothing to do with peace. "All options are on the table," he professed to an Israeli news outlet. Of course these seemingly threatening statements drummed of another looming battle.

On May 24, 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United States Congress. In his speech he declared that, “you [the US] don't need to send American troops to Israel. We defend ourselves.” Yet, in his more recent United Nations speech, he seemed to push the US to, yes, ironically protect Israel from a potentially nuclear Iran. Of course, American soldiers would not fight from Israeli soil, but rather from the Persian Gulf. What is the difference?

by Ananya Vajpeyi

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia
by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

It is way past the time to sit back and take a deep breath and rethink this reflexive rush to military solutions to foreign policy conundrums.

In yet another stellar issue of World Literature Today (May/June 2012), the dastardly practice of censorship of literature and writers in general was given due attention. In his informative piece on censorship in Iran, Blake Atwood ends his piece with the following commentary:

by Glenn Petersen

Ultima Ratio Regum Latin for “[War,] the last argument of kings,” this quote summed up the classical approach to warfare, that it was the method of achieving a specific strategic goal of the realm when other methods had failed. In modern times though, it seems that war is often the result of a chain of political miscalculations by heads of state. Such is the situation with Iran and the United States, where armed conflict seems more and more likely the eventual outcome of our current diplomatic standoff.

On November 6, 2011, two Iranian activists involved in the Green Movement visited Liberty Square, the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, to deliver messages of solidarity, and to ask for support in return.