Someone Had Died in Front of Our House

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(10 16 26 1)>A collection of short stories by Akbar Fallahzadeh. The author's note on the book: The stories in this collection were written at different times but they all reflect the realities of our era: an era of pain and displacement. The earlier stories in this collection come from a time when we along with fellow theater and storytelling enthusiasts (in the early 1980s) would write and read plays and stories together. We were all alike: young passionate about reading and writing poor and thin yet hopeful with eyes gleaming searching for freedom and justice clad in oversized pocket-filled coats that held all our possessions. In the wide underarm pockets we carried our own or our friends' stories and plays passing them hand to hand since censorship wouldn't allow them to be printed. On one side there was the Iran-Iraq war and everywhere else there were street patrol jeeps. In the midst of this we would nervously read write smoke smoke smoke and cough. When we got hungry we'd share a sandwich. No one would give us work. To get a job you needed approval from the local committee or mosque and if we showed up around those places we'd end up getting arrested. Each of us in our own way had said no to the authorities and we were paying the heavy price of that no in our daily lives. From the Cultural Revolution (May 1980) to the bitter poison of the ceasefire and the massacre of political prisoners (summer 1988) these were the hardest and most painful years of our lives-perhaps for all generations throughout Iranian history. We mostly 20- to 25-year-olds were suddenly crushed and aged fifty years. We grew old without ever having experienced youth. Back then reading and writing were suspicious activities. We engaged in this suspicious act with fear and trembling. We critiqued stories hastily often standing up and sometimes even fought over them. Several stories in this collection are from or influenced by that time. Other stories written years later in exile still carry the mood of those years with their pain and fears. Fear pain and insecurity have deeply rooted themselves in us and they cannot be removed. This collection however is not devoid of other subjects including daily life in exile and the virtual world. The virtual life has long since become part of our existence. A few of the stories explore the interaction between traditional life and the virtual world. Akbar Fallahzadeh earned his bachelor's degree in Dramatic Literature from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Tehran and received his PhD in Modern German Literature and Media Studies from the University of Marburg Germany. His first book was a translation of the play Easter by August Strindberg which was banned in the mid-1980s due to its anti-war and peace-promoting preface. He has been a writer for Radio Zamaneh for many years and has also translated The Death Penalty: History Origins and Victims by the German author Karl Bruno Leder.</span></p>