Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hold Me, Fishes

Hold Me, Fishes

Shieslar, Alireza
Afshari, Sambol

Paperback

PlaysPlaywriting

ISBN10: 1997503271
ISBN13: 9781997503279
Publisher: Asemana Books
Published: Mar 2 2026
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.31
Height: 0.27 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

These plays are written by Alireza Shilser, an Iranian playwright based in Luxembourg. It is a work born out of lived experience-structural violence, exile, war, and the psychological collapse of the contemporary human being-and it uncompromisingly forces the audience into confrontation. The play, Hold Me, Fishes, was selected as the chosen work of the 14th Iranian Theater Festival in Heidelberg, Germany, and has also been staged at the Iranian Theater Festival in Cologne. These performances demonstrate that the text is not merely literature on the page, but a work with strong performative potential and immediate impact on stage. Shilser, who holds a Master's degree in Dramatic Literature, engages in this play with themes that are rarely comfortable or easily digestible: institutionalized violence, the wounded body, collective memory, migration, and the human being crushed under the weight of ideology and power. The language of the play is not poetic for the sake of beauty; it is harsh because the world it portrays is harsh. Emotions are not softened, and suffering is not censored. This play is an attempt to record the voices of those who are usually unseen-a text that seeks neither consolation nor entertainment, but instead challenges the audience and leaves them unsettled. The publication of this work by Asemana Books, both in book form and online, offers an opportunity for a more serious engagement with one of the independent and uncompromising voices of contemporary Persian-language theater.

Also in

Plays

View All