A friend called
It is still winter in Germany and I sit at my desk working when an email of an old acquaintance of mine popped up. Fatemeh Pourjafari and I know each other from Berlin where she spent 6 months on a stipend at the Friedrich-Schlegel-School at the Freie Universität. Now she told me that she had finished her dissertation and was looking for a publisher. So I offered her my skills and also my small publishing house to publish her tremendous work: an analysis about selected English post-postmodern novels by Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy and Jonathan Franzen to demonstrate that a paradigm shift has occurred in literature at the turn of the millennium, both in the re-establishment of authorial authority and ethical agency.
During her stay in Berlin Fatemeh was a guest in my home in Berlin and I learned a lot about her beautiful home in Iran and her work at the university. It opened a door to a more unowned world to me.