In Case of Emergency

In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces.

What do you do when the world is falling apart and you're in withdrawal?

Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up one day to apocalyptic earthquakes and a dangerously low stash. Outside, Tehran is crumbling: yuppies flee in bumper-to-bumper traffic as skaters and pretty boys rise up to claim the city as theirs. Cross-dressed to evade hijab laws, Shadi flits between her dysfunctional family and depressed friends--all in search of her next fix.

Mahsa Mohebali's groundbreaking novel about Iranian counterculture is a satirical portrait of the disaster that is contemporary life. Weaving together gritty vernacular and cinematic prose, In Case of Emergency takes a darkly humorous, scathing look at the authoritarian state, global capitalism, and the gender binary.

Mahsa Mohebali is an Iranian fiction writer. She is the author of several novels, as well as short story collections. Her short stories have appeared in English in the Guardian as well as the anthologies Tehran Noir (Akashic Books, 2014, trans. Salar Abdoh) and Alive and Kicking: Short Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women Writers (Aftab Publication, 2017, trans. Amir Marashi). In 2013 Mohebali was a resident with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She lives and works in Tehran.

Mariam Rahmani is a writer, translator, and scholar. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast; her translations have been published with Columbia Journal and After Cinema: Fictions From A Collective Memory; and her nonfiction writing has appeared in BOMB magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus, among other venues. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a US Fulbright Research Award, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA, as well as degrees from Princeton and Oxford. She is currently working on a debut novel.