Shohreh Laici
SHOHREH LAICI is a Tehran-based essayist and literary translator. Her works have appeared in a range of American journals, including World Literature Today, The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation, Two Lines Press, Asheville Poetry Review, and Statorec.
My Roots Were Somewhere With You
By Shohreh Laici“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now 50 or 60 countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.”
Negar Djavadi's Disoriental
By Shohreh Laici“Escalators are for them.” This is crucial to Darius Sadr—father to the protagonist of Disoriental, and a symbol of Iranian progressives who reflect the regret and disappointment of Iranian intellectuals living in exile. Later in the book, the author makes it clear that this sentence was her original source of inspiration in writing the book.
