The interrogation: Interviews at the limit.

Amir Ahmadi Arian is well known to readers of The New York Times, Harper's, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and London Review of Books. Though he began as a successful writer in Iran, writing in Farsi, by 2010 the Iranian authorities had banned three of his books, and shuttered the publishing house and newspaper where he worked. He emigrated first to Australia (2014) and then New York (2018) writing now in English and becoming, for anglophone readers, a vital source of news about Iran. In this interview, the topic is Arian's first English-language novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him, a fictional account of the arrest, torture, and interrogation of a Tehran public bus driver, whom the Iranian authorities implausibly frame as the mastermind of revolutionary opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The interview examines the coincidence in the novel of interrogation, dramatic dialogue, and traditional literary interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]