56 Degrees

56 Degrees A Dystopian Novel by Hossein Noushazar ISBN: 9781997503163 One Hundred and Thirty Years After the 1979 Revolution, Iran is scorched under the 56-degree heat of the desert, ravaged by global warming, desertification, and water tensions. The narrator and Homa, a curious couple from Berkeley, step into this devastated land in search of lost cultural roots. From the dreamlike Esfahan to Ashtian, a utopia full of flaws, they are confronted with fundamental questions: What is identity? What does mourning mean? What is the value of life? Could the mythical stream of the Zagros mountains offer a glimmer of hope for life's rebirth?

Hossein Noushazar (born 1963) is an Iranian writer, translator, and journalist. He emigrated from Iran in the late 1980s and spent many years in Germany, where he pursued academic studies and worked in healthcare and psychiatric institutions-initially as a nurse and later as a psychotherapist. These formative experiences deeply influenced his fiction, particularly the short story collections Shadowed Walls (Tassvir Publications, 1992, USA), At the Relatives' Table (1994), Letters from a Crocodile to Its Doppelgänger (1996), and A Sunny Day (1999). This period in his literary career is marked by themes of madness and melancholia, shaped profoundly by the experience of displacement and the difficult realities of life as an asylum seeker. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, he published two novellas: A Meditation on Solitude (Baran, 1992) and Neither Alone, Nor Resilient: A Tall Tale of a City (Ketab, 1997). These works explore the emotional landscape of exile, alienation, and severance from one's cultural roots. His second phase of authorship (2006-2013) was characterized by a renewed focus on publishing in Iran. During this time, he released the novels The Departed (Ney Publishing) and His Shadow Will No Longer Darken the Earth (Morvarid Publishing), as well as translations of works by Richard Brautigan and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This literary period coincided with his move to France and his departure from the field of psychotherapy. Years later, uncensored editions of The Departed (Payam Publishing, Germany) and For You (Mehri, London) were published, both receiving critical acclaim. In 1996, alongside Bahman Forsi, Noushazar launched the inaugural issue of the literary journal Sang (Stone). He later expanded the project in collaboration with Behrouz Sheyda (a Sweden-based literary scholar) and the renowned poet Abbas Saffari, continuing publication of the journal into the 2000s. Sang became one of the most innovative and respected Persian-language literary periodicals outside Iran. Since 2010, he has worked as a cultural journalist with Radio Zamaneh and, in collaboration with Shahriar Mandanipur, publishes the literary magazine Baang, for which he serves as editor-in-chief and license holder.