“I said her name!”: Roya Hakakian’s Statement on Mahsa Amini & #IranRevolution2022

October 2, 2022October 1, 2022 by Various Authors

“Here’s my testimony [in English] before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days ago.

رویا حکاکیان، عضو هیئت مدیره توانا:

ایرانیان حاضرند بهای آزادی خود را بپردازند#مهسا_امینی #اعتراضات_سراسری #یاری_مدنی_توانا #رویا_حکاکیان pic.twitter.com/d0mTJ9TWiC

— توانا Tavaana (@Tavaana) September 24, 2022

Roya Hakakian isn’t a natural-born spokesperson. She’s more recessive; Roya the writer is no politico. Yet she talks straight to Senators above.

If she speaks to you, try this piece by Paul Berman. It takes in her tonal variousness. Hakakian has written two volumes of poetry in Persian and three books of non-fiction in English, the first of which was Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, which came out in 2004. Berman zeroes on how that book jumped off with a dedication that proved her instinct for “the intimate and the complex” coexisted with a knack for “the declamatory”:

The book is a memoir of her teenage years in Tehran. Those were the last years of the Shah and the first years of the Islamic Republic and the Iran-Iraq War—years of revolutionary lyricism, of appalling medievalism, and of suffering. The opening words are a trumpet-blast dedication in capital letters, which make clear that she does not belong to the school of discreet elision:

BETWEEN 1982 AND 1990 AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF IRANIAN WOMEN POLITICAL PRISONERS WERE RAPED ON THE EVE OF THEIR EXECUTIONS BY GUARDS WHO ALLEGED THAT KILLING A VIRGIN WAS A SIN IN ISLAM‌

This book is dedicated to the memory of those women.

Tonight, as protesters gather again in Iranian cities, Ms. Hakakian urges us to keep the focus on “#Mahsa Amini and all the valorous men and women making the #IranRevolution2022 possible!”

Order from Dottir Press here.

“Laurie Stone’s Streaming Now is a book of journal-like entries, scraps of critical pieces, bits of memoir, and it is a delight. She calls these fragments postcards, which is charming and accurate up to a point, but the writing is better than any postcard you ever got unless you got one from Laurie Stone and she wrote it really small so all the wit and all the passing contemplations could fit. She writes about life during COVID, at home with ‘the man I live with’; about old friends and glancing love affairs; about books and films and television shows, with a deeply appealing combination of spitfire skepticism and a constant openness to pleasure and joy. One is reminded in multiple ways during the reading that Stone came of age and was politically, intellectually and emotionally shaped by the struggles and commitments of second wave feminism, and we’re further reminded that for feminists like Stone the movement was not only about rights, and not at all about protections for women, but about freedom for women, a much more dangerous thing, for women and for society at large. Freedom is a long lost idea. It had a specific erotic push and was battled back as eroticism always is. Autocracies are always puritanical. Everything about Stone’s writing is oriented toward freedom and much of her linguistic and literary sensibility specifically evokes erotic and intellectual freedom–the very sound of the sentences, their surprises, the quick adoption of new positions in relation to the thing looked at and engaged with. So, one recognizes that a simple seeming book of pensées is really the exploration of a distinct and valuable cultural point of view. We are lucky to have it.” –Vince Passaro, author of the novels Crazy Sorrow, and Violence, Nudity, Adult Content

Alison Stone’s New Book Available for Pre-Order!

From immigrants to insurrectionists, from Demeter to David Bowie, Stone gives us searing, moving poems filled with powerful imagery and an original music.

Order your copy at www.stonepoetry.org

Order from Bloomsbury here.

Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA