In Case of emergency

by mahsa mohebali

Translated by Mariam Rahmani

Tehran 2008 / New York 2021

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022

Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2021 National Translation Award and awarded an Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize by the MLA

In Case of Emergency, by Mahsa Mohebali, translated from the Farsi by Mariam Rahmani (Feminist Press). This novel, published in Iran in 2008, takes place in Tehran in the course of a day when the city has been flung into chaos by a series of earthquakes. Shadi, the young, disaffected narrator, is less concerned with the disaster than she is with locating her next opium fix. Rather than flee the city with her family, she spends the day traversing it, getting high with various misfit friends and making observations about Tehrani society with her acerbic wit. Her sardonic commentary is interspersed with sensual descriptions of her highs, and of the periodic quakes roiling the ground beneath her. “I wish I could sink, pour into the earth and dance with her,” she declares. “Let the tremors crawl through my body. I don’t want them to stop.”

— THE NEW YORKER

“Sheekasteh is the Farsi expression for the kind of visceral, idiomatic slang that characterizes this book’s prose — nimbly translated here by the scholar Mariam Rahmani — but the word literally means ‘broken.’ The novel’s most compelling transgression may be linguistic, the tectonic shift it represents in Iranian letters.”

— Negar Azimi in THE NEW YORK TIMES

“I feel like my own voice is coming from somewhere far far away. I don’t know what or where to touch.”

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“A brilliant and jarring portrait of contemporary Iran, rife with unrest, drugs, and destruction.”

— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“A compelling portrait of a city in crisis.”

— KIRKUS

“Utterly shattering - I could hardly catch my breath… At turns hilarious and deeply unnerving, here is contemporary Tehran as never glimpsed before. Mariam Rahmani's pitch-perfect translation is intoxicatingly energetic, capturing all the poetry and pathos of disintegration. Read this now.”

— Justin Torres

“A macabre urban carnival of a novel. In Mariam Rahmani’s inspired, electric translation, Mahsa Mohebali’s portrait of the unmoored offspring of Tehran’s educated elite jolts the reader, offering a rare visceral glimpse into contemporary Iran.”

— Natasha Wimmer, translator of The Savage Detectives

“Hypnotic. Rahmani beautifully captures Mohebali’s slangy, strung-out narration. This underbelly tour of a Tehran shaken by both unrest and literal quakes kept me enthralled.”

— Susan Bernofsky, TRANSLATOR

“Mariam Rahmani’s startling new translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency practically vibrates in the hand. It’s demotic, queer, deeply and lovingly Persian in a way few texts that make it stateside ever are. It’s also laugh out loud funny, humane in its treatment of addiction without condescending. Rahmani’s translation is brilliant—her language throughout dazzles and sears… Turns out I’d been waiting for [this book] my entire life. ”

— Kaveh Akbar

“… Resist turning the pages too quickly, lest you miss the myriad and complexity of flavors. Mariam Rahmani’s superb translation is fully evidenced in the precision of detail, the tone of voice, and most of all, the comedy, which is perhaps the most difficult, if not impossible, aspect of writing to convey from one language to another. ”