Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
For me, literature is landscape. Landscape happens to be an extraordinarily mutable, dynamic surface, and one that, much like the novel, registers the passage of time. I am particularly interested in the ways that literature and landscape disappear into and mirror one another.”
“Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly...Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character...Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing.”
“A love story of the most fevered, brutal order...The prose is propulsive, erotic, and darkly dreamlike, recalling the early novels of Marguerite Duras...[SAVAGE TONGUES] interrogates the narratives we assign to the past and asks what we are allowed to expect of those who love us.”
“A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.”
“Rich and delightful...crackles throughout with wit and absurdity...a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side by side to tell an original and memorable story.”
“Once in a while a singular, adventurous and intellectually humorous voice appears that takes us on an inescapable journey. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra is a library within a library, a Borges-esque labyrinth of references from all cultures and all walks of life. In today’s visual Netflix world, Ms. Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel performs at the highest of levels in accomplishing only what the written novel can show us.”
“Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling.”
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. Her most recent novel is Savage Tongues (Mariner Books, 2021), which Joy Williams praised as “political, poetical, and spooky good.” Her novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, was long listed for the PEN Open Book Award, and was named a Best Book by over twenty publications. She received a Whiting Writers Award and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award for her first novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012).
She is the 2023-2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fiction Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. A recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Aspen Institute, and MacDowell, her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review among other places. In 2020, she founded Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance, a conversation series focused on the intersection of the arts and transformational migrations.
Born in Los Angeles, she spent her childhood in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain, and speaks Farsi, Italian, and Spanish. She currently splits her time between New York City and South Bend, Indiana, where she is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
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