A depiction of how abstract political machinations crystalize into absurd, capricious violence.
-The New Yorker
The strangeness and physicality with which Arian depicts Yunus’s prison life makes for a convincing, unnerving read.
-The New York Times
Arian blends sharp, journalistic observations of Tehran’s politics and street scenes with a deeply empathetic portrait of Yunus’s troubled interior life. This is an essential work of contemporary Iran.
-Publishers Weekly
Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a penetrating political fiction emerging at a time that this genre has been deprived of its principle trait
-Los Angeles Review of Books
A distressing, smartly interior tale of the horrors sown by oppressive politics.
-Kirkus Reviews