| Tuesday, March 24, 2009 12:06PM | | | | Alev Croutier & Sharnush Parsipur | Posted By: PEN Branch: PEN West
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PEN AMERICAN CENTER WEST
presents
ALEV LYTLE CROUTIER and SHAHRNUSH PARSIPUR
discussing and reading from their work
Saturday, April 4th, 2009, from 3 to 5 PM
Alev Lytle Croutier was born in Izmir, Turkey. She came to this country at age 18, became a filmmaker, and made theatrical films and wrote screenplays, among them “Tell Me a Riddle,” based on Tillie Olsen’s celebrated novella. This work earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first ever awarded for a screenplay. Later she founded Mercury House; she served as executive editor there for nearly a decade. Her books include the non-fiction Harem: The World Behind the Veil and the novels The Palace of Tears and Seven Houses.
Shahrnush Parsipur was born and educated in Tehran and later studied in France. She has served three terms in Iranian prison for her activities and writings, especially her short-story collection Women Without Men. All of her 11 books are banned in Iran; many are translated into English and several European languages. She was the first recipient of the International Writers’ Project Fellowship at Brown University. She lives in exile in California. Among her books are four collections of short stories; the novels Touba and the Meaning of Night (a best-seller in Iran before its banning); Blue Logos; The Simple and Small Adventures of Spirit of the Tree; Shiva (political science fiction); and a prison memoir.
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“Alev Croutier’s grown-up fairy tale, with its strangely mesmerizing events, operates in a wonderful space between story and history and lures the reader into that place directly.”
—Diane Johnson, on The Palace of Tears
“A landmark in Iranian literature . . . There is more than tradition at work in Parsipur’s writing: realism, the political novel, Sufi writings and the influence of Persian fairytales, lending a magical realist atmosphere. . .a well constructed tale, placing politics and history at the center of an individual life”
—Myslexia
Where: at the home of Brenda Webster,
President, PEN West
2671 Shasta Road, Berkeley
Directions: Drive up Cedar Street, turn left at Euclid,
right on Buena Vista, left on LeRoy.
LeRoy runs into Shasta.
RSVP: 510-548-2618 or email Websterbrenda1@aol.com | | | |
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