Yaghoub Yadali Presents Rituals of Restlessness
Diesel, A Bookstore | 5433 College Avenue | Oakland, CA
Iranian author Yaghoub Yadali read from his latest book, Rituals of Restlessness, at Oakland’s Diesel: A Bookstore on May 19. The book is the first novel to be released in Phoneme Media’s City of Asylum book series in partnership with the Pittsburgh non-profit City of Asylum, which provides shelter for exiled writers.
Engineer Kamran Khosravi wants to die in a car accident. His professional life in the Iranian hinterlands is full of bureaucratic drudgery, protecting dams, for example, from looters. His wife Fariba can no longer stand it, and has left him to rejoin her family in Isfahan. She is anxious for him to choose a life with her, or to let her go and persist with things as they are, but Kamran’s issues run deeper than anybody imagines.
Translated by Sarah Khalili, Rituals of Restlessness won the 2004 Golshiri Foundation Award for the best novel of the year and was named one of the ten best novels of the decade by the Press Critics Award in Iran. In 2007, however, Yadali was sentenced to one year in prison for having depicted an adulterous affair in the novel. Rituals of Restlessness and his short story collection Sketches in the Garden have been banned from publication and reprint in Iran.
Yaghoub Yadali has directed for television and worked for Roshd Magazine as the editor of the film section. His first novel, The Rituals of Restlessness, won Iran’s 2004 Golshiri Foundation Award for the best novel of the year. However, in 2007 Yadali was sentenced to prison for having depicted an adulterous love affair in the novel, an event that ultimately led to his exile. Yadali’s short stories, articles, and essays are published in Iran, Turkey, and the U.S. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa, Harvard University, and City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.