Written during the first days of the 2026 war on Iran and published anonymously to protect the author and the translator, Night of the World offers an account of war not seen in the news: a deeply eloquent document of daily life in Tehran and an unmistakable voice that refuses to be silenced.
I could not trust the news or my memory anymore. I began to take pictures, record sounds. In Tehran and other cities I travel to. Conversations at cafés. A baby whimpering in her mother's arms, the mother cooing her to sleep. Buses and cars and motorcycles. Taxi drivers and passengers. Storeowners and customers. Bazaars. Children playing in parks. Pleasantries. Poetry readings. Birds singing. Rain falling. Nightly slogans chanted from behind the windows, from rooftops. Protests in the streets. It was the time of the massacre. Its aftermath.
Amid the waves of airstrikes launched by the US and Israel in 2026, an anonymous writer in Tehran begins to take his coffee on the roof. He observes each explosion, guessing at its location, and calls friends to see whether they have survived: "When they hit the Shahran oil depot I call D. to make sure the flames have not reached their house. When B-2s drop heavy bombs on the military base downtown, I call the old poet who lives close by." Rooftops, those "semipublic, semiprivate spaces," used in times of peace for grilling with friends or watching an eclipse, become a site of resistance and witness as history violently unfolds.
In surges of writing sent to a friend between internet blackouts, there emerges a powerfully eloquent depiction of daily life--falling back to an old lover, deep readings of Stendhal, crossing the city to water office plants--amid the parallel horrors of state-sanctioned violence and war, where every ordinary gesture acquires the weight of testimony. Published anonymously to protect the safety of the author and the translator, Night of the World is an indispensable act of resistance against the silencing forces of history--intimate, lucid, and profoundly alive.
