Tooba and the Meaning of Night

A major literary event, the publication of Tooba and the Meaning of Night introduces English-speaking readers to the masterpiece of a great contemporary Persian writer, renowned in her native Iran, but until now virtually unknown in the United States. This remarkable novel was begun during one of the author's many imprisonments. It was published in Iran in 1989 to great critical acclaim and instant bestseller status, but a year later Shahrnush Parsipur was again arrested, and all of her works were banned by the Islamic Republic. In an epic that recalls Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Parsipur explores the changing fortunes of Iranian women through 80 years of turbulent history as she follows her heroine's search for spiritual and intellectual truth. Taking in a broad sweep of characters and events, Tooba's life intersects with several periods in Iran's history, from the British and Russian colonization of Iranian oil to the 1979 Islamic Revoution. Tooba and the Meaning of Night defies Western stereotypes of Iranian women and Western expectations of literary form, speaking in an idiom that reflects both the unique creative voice of its author and a new tradition in Persian women's writing. Shahrnush Parsipur is the author of eleven books, including Women Without Men. She was born in Iran in 1946 and published her first short stories in literary magazines at the age of 16, and went on to write essays, story collections, and several novels. She was arrested for the first time in 1974, by the Shah's intelligence agency, and would be jailed three additional times under the Islamic Republic. Parsipur now lives and writes in exile in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1994 she was recognized by the Fund for Free Expression of Human Rights Watch-Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammet Fund, and in 2003 she received the first fellowship offered by Brown University International Writer's Project.