Laetitia Nanquette's book Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution falls in the category of the sociology of literature, in this case, Iranian literature from Iran itself and from the Iranian diaspora. The aim of the book is “to show what literature can tell us about post-revolutionary Iran and to profile the Iranian literary fields in all its complexity…. It narrates several different aspects of the story of contemporary literature: within Iran and in the diaspora; the independent and the governmental fields; canonical literature… as well as popular and children's literatures; the local, the national and the global levels and all the informal connections in between” (2–3). This is a very ambitious aim for one monograph, maybe too ambitious, but Nanquette's book successfully tackles most of the fields mentioned in the quote above. Poetry and its relation to society, in the main, is excluded from the book. But here the interested reader can turn to Fatemeh Shams's A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-Option Under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press 2021), a work that Nanquette also refers us to. In general, Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution is more than well researched, and the list of references in the back of the book (259–86) is a gold mine for all researchers and students interested in Iranian literature and the sociology of that literature.

Nanquette's book is divided into two parts. Part One, which includes Chapters 1–4, is about the mechanisms of literature production in Iran; it also includes a fifth chapter about Iranian children's literature. Part Two (Chapters 6–9 and an afterword) deals with the mechanisms of the literary field in the diaspora and Iranian literature in the world. “Chapter 5,” Nanquette writes, “makes a junction between the two parts” (17), since children's literature is a success both inside Iran and in being exported and circulated (in translation) outside the country. I will return to the topic of “success in the world” below.

Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution, as mentioned, takes its readers through many topics. In Part One, we are presented with the genres or forms (though Nanquette is not quite clear in formulating a difference between the two) where especially romance novels are singled out as the most popular and best-selling genre. We are also presented with the two types of publication houses and booksellers: a governmental one, which is subsidized and generally supported by the state, and independent publication houses and booksellers, which stand for more than 80% of the literary production. Over these hovers the state's censorship, controlling and directing the book market and at the same time also co-opting independent publishers, who, Nanquette informs us, are often indirectly supported by the state. Digital literature, a way for some to escape censorship, is an important topic covered; literary blogs of both reformist and conservative persuasions, as well as publications on Instagram and teaching literature writing on Facebook, are described in detail. Here, it would have been helpful had Nanquette included some examples of the new genres (or forms) that digital media have created. Both the ultra-short, short stories (dāstānaks) and the postmodern ghazal are mentioned, and some examples of these, in all of their brevity, could have been included as is one erotic do-bayti poem, published online, later in the book. Finally, Nanquette presents two other important topics in the book's first part that are worth mentioning. The first of these is the polarization between the so-called independent publishers and cultural institutions, the second the state-supported, governmental ones. The second—and I believe this is a first for research conducted outside Iran—is a relatively precise presentation of the production and distribution of literary texts within Iran since the revolution in 1979.

In the second part of her book, Nanquette analyzes the gap between the book market and publishing within Iran and the authors and the book market of the Iranian diaspora. Despite growing globalization and the easy communication through social media and the Internet, it seems that the gap is not easily filled. A presentation of two publishers, the France-based Naakojaa and the UK- and Iran-based Candle & Fog, underlines the difficulties in bridging the gap between the diasporic literary market and the Iranian one. The same conclusion is later drawn regarding the translation of Iranian literature in the United States and France and the work and conditions of Iranian writers in Australia.

The final chapter in Nanquette's book, “Post-Revolutionary Iranian Literature in the World and in the Persian Cultural System,” might as well have been named “Is Iranian Literature Global, and Does It Matter?”—which is actually the subtitle on the second page of the chapter. More directly put, the question has been reframed as: Why have Iranian authors not been able to create a name and fame for themselves in the international world of literature? This question has been asked many times in the past centuries in Iranian literary circles (e.g., Omid Azadibougar's The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery, Amsterdam 2014). Nanquette's chapter begins with a presentation of two translations of Iranian novels available in the Western book market: Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story (not published in Persian) and Parinoush Saniee's The Book of Fate (Sahm-e man, Tehran 2003). Nanquette examines their circulation and reception in North America, compared with the reception of Azar Nafisi's well-known Reading Lolita in Tehran, concluding that, despite the relatively high sales of the first two mentioned novels, they were far surpassed by Nafisi's work. (This reviewer would like to add that Zoya Pirzad has also had success with her books in translation in the West). Nanquette's question—Should Iranian literature really be more global?—should probably be directed to our Iranian academic colleagues and Iranian men and women of letters. Nanquette's answer is very sensible:

She goes on to show how the Iranian state has supported its film industry and, at times, the visual arts, which has especially helped the former's success in the world. This has not been the case of literature—with the sole exception of children's literature—and the combination of being excluded from the international world and the lack of support from the Iranian state can easily explain the “lack of success” Iranian literature has had within world literature. I wish that Nanquette had stopped the chapter on page 245 rather than speculate on the poetic nature of Persian (note: not Iranian here!) culture, which should supposedly lend itself more easily to film (that has had global success) than to prose literature, as well as other generalizations that are very difficult to substantiate.

In conclusion, this reviewer has some minor reservations about Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution—Production and Circulation in Iran and the World. To these reservations, I must add a criticism of the charts on pages 50–51. They are barely readable. In general, however, I will recommend Laetitia Nanquette's book to all readers interested in the sociology of modern literature in Iran. Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution is a must read in this field.