On Wednesday, April 15th, the novelist, scholar, essayist, and translator Mariam Rahmani, who is a faculty member at Bennington read from her recent novel, Liquid (Algonquin Books, 2025) in Tishman Lecture Hall. The event was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College.
Mariam Rahmani’s fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as Granta, New York Magazine, People, the Los Angeles Times’s Image Magazine, Columbia Journal, and n+1.Rahmani’s first book-length translation, of the contemporary Iranian cult hit novel In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, was well-reviewed in The New Yorker and The New York Times, named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. She is now working on her next translation, of Farzaneh Milani’s The Literary Biography of Forugh Farrokhzad (Liveright 2026). She serves on the advisory and editorial boards of Acacia, a new magazine for the Muslim left.
In Liquid, A Love Story, a queer Indian-Iranian adjunct professor in LA tries to marry rich—until reality hits and she’s pulled to Tehran to tend to a family crisis. Deemed “smart, addictive” by Vanity Fair and “bitterly funny” by British Vogue—with “profound, unanswerable questions… [that] glitter at the edges of certain passages like shards of glass” according to The New York Times Book Review—Liquid is one of Oprah Daily’s 25 Most Anticipated Books of the Year and a March Book of the Month Club Main Pick. “Rahmani is in many ways reinventing the Iranian American novel, subtly yet substantially,” Porochista Khakpour writes for The Atlantic, “…in writing so electrically alive that the reader feels fully immersed in her world.” Liquid is currently being translated into Italian, Dutch, and Croatian.
An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by Director of Poetry at Bennington, Michael Dumanis. Rahmani, who is currently teaching the seminar, LIT 4596: Advanced Translation Workshop, read excerpts from Liquid that mentions a book, coincidentally in class reading called The Blind Owl, a major literary work of 20th century Iran and undoubtedly the magnum opus of Sadegh Hedyayet. “In several ways, the book echoes The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, which is regarded as the first modern novel in Farsi, first published in 1937 and translated into English in 1957, which also features an unnamed narrator with an Indian mother and an Iranian father,” said Rahmani in a recent interview with Bennington College.
The reading ended with a brief Q&A and book signing. Copies of Liquid were sold in Tishman.
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