Salar Abdoh

Salar Abdoh was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the author of the novels Tehran at Twilight, The Poet Game, and Opium; and he is the editor of Tehran Noir. He teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York. Told through the voice of Saleh, a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran’s most popular TV shows, (Akashic Books) is an unprecedented glimpse into “endless war” from a Middle Eastern perspective. Drawing from his firsthand experience of being embedded with Shia militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, Salar Abdoh gives a voice to the voiceless while offering a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true. Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, called it “a brutally realistic look at war and love and fear and everything else that humans do. The writing is impossibly good.”