Haleh Esfandiari

Haleh Esfandiari’s 2006 Christmas trip to visit her mother in Iran turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare with international implications. On the return trip to the airport, her taxi was forced off the road, her passport and airline tickets were stolen, and Esfandiari suddenly found herself a victim of the paranoid and repressive bureaucracy of her native Iran. A journalist and scholar who had moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and who founded the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Division, Esfandiari soon became a prisoner of the country she’d fled — literally so after interrogations suggested that her work for the Center was simply a cover for a U.S. plot to overthrow the Iranian government. On the basis of those suspicions, Esfandiari was thrown into solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison —  for months, perhaps for life — and colleagues, friends and family, including her husband, George Mason University professor Shaul Bakhash, began a long and uncertain struggle to win her freedom. 

Esfandiari’s new book, My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran, promises not just a behind-the-scenes account of her harsh ordeals and ultimate release but also a poignant memoir of growing up in Iran under Mossadegh and Mohammed Reza Shah and an on-the-ground history of relations between the U.S. and Iran under four presidents. Azar Nafisi, bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, has already given the book high praise, commenting that “Haleh Esfandiari’s personal narrative begins with a horrific event, one that transformed her beloved country of birth into a prison, but it is also an account of that country’s rich and complex history and culture.”

Mark your calendars now for Esfandiari’s appearance at the 2009 Fall for the Book Festival:  Tuesday, September 22, at 3 p.m. in Research I, Room 163, on George Mason University’s Fairfax, Virginia Campus.

ALSO ADDED: 

Adam Besenyodi, author of  Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic-Book Fan,  on Tuesday, September 22, at 3 p.m. in Grand Tier III, Center for the Arts, Mason’s Fairfax Campus. Check out Wired’s review of the book here. 

Fall for the Book brings more than 130 authors to Northern Virginia, DC and Maryland — September 21-26, with special preview events in the weeks leading up to the festival. All events are free and open to the public. Bookmark Fall for the Book’s website for continuing updates and a complete schedule of events.