South

South is a hallucinatory reimagination of life in a world under totalitarianism, and an individual's quest for truth, agency, and understanding."A quiet meditation on imagination and reality, absence and presence, and the world around us. Lakghomi achieves a poetic and hypnotic effect with his tightly constructed, spare prose." -- Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed"Babak Lakghomi's slyly subversive and uncanny novel is pure sublime. It wastes no syllable while wading neck-deep into its own conspiracy, remembering just in time to come back up for air where others drown." -- Blake Butler, author of AannexB, a journalist, travels to the South of an unnamed desert country for a mysterious mission to write a report about the recent strikes on an offshore oil rig. From the beginning of his trip, he is faced with a cruel and broken landscape of drought and decay, superstitious believers of evil winds and spirits, and corrupt entities focused on manipulation and censorship. As he tries to d