Suppose that the books of, say, Milan Kundera or Isabel Allende or Naguib Mahfouz had been unavailable in English until this year. So it is with Shahriar Mandanipour, whose new Censoring an Inranian Love Story is the first of his works to appear in English translation. Says David Mattin, “It will be for many, I suspect, a first encounter not just with Mandanipour but with Iranian fiction of any kind. … Quite a loss, given that these writers are the current voice of a literary tradition that stretches back 2,500 years.”