Canceled — Amir Ahmadi Arian on Then the Fish Swallowed Him with Shirin Neshat

$10

Admission and $10 off at our bookstore

Out of stock

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT March 24, 2020

The Center for Fiction

Then the Fish book cover - Carla Cain-Walther

This event has been canceled. If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].

A conversation on the complex relationship between interrogator and prisoner in a totalitarian state, with critically acclaimed Iranian writer, Amir Ahmadi Arian, in his English-language debut. He’ll be in conversation with world-renowned filmmaker, photographer and visual artist, Shirin Neshat, whose work addresses individual freedoms under attack by social ideologies in Iran.

This event is part of our In Conversation series: After years of solitary research, multiple drafts, and all the range of human emotions, the project is done! Fellow writers, editors, and visual artists talk craft, process, and story with the author.

Featuring

Amir Ahmadi Arian

Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera

Amir Ahmadi Arian

Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera

Amir Ahmadi Arian is an Iranian novelist and journalist. He has written two critically acclaimed novels and a book of nonfiction in Farsi. In English, his short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Lithub, London Review of Books, Witness Magazine, Massachusetts Review, etc. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Queensland, Australia, and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at City College, New York.
Shirin Neshat

Photo by Rodolfo Martinez

Shirin Neshat

Photo by Rodolfo Martinez

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat continues to explore and experiment with the mediums of photography, video, and film. Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide. A major survey of the artist’s work from the past 25 years opened in October 2019 at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Neshat has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Golden Lion Award – the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), The Crystal Award (2014), and most recently the Praemium Imperiale (2017). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Neshat’s second feature film, Looking for Oum Kulthum, opened at the Venice Film Festival in 2017 and has since been screened in numerous other international film festivals. In 2017, she directed her first opera, AIDA at the Salzburg Music Festival, in Austria. Neshat is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York, and Brussels and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and London.

.

Then the Fish Swallowed Him

By Amir Ahmadi Arian

Published by HarperCollins | HarperVia

PURCHASE

Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stakes psychological game of cat and mouse, where Yunus endures a mind-bending cycle of solitary confinement and interrogation. In their startlingly intimate exchanges, Yunus’s life begins to unfold—from his childhood memories growing up in a freer Iran to his heartbreaking betrayal of his only friend. As Yunus struggles to hold on to his sanity and evade Saeed’s increasingly undeniable accusations, he must eventually make an impossible choice: continue fighting or submit to the system of lies upholding Iran’s power.bGripping, startling, and masterfully told, Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a haunting story of life under despotism.