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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
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Biography, Literature & Literary studies

LIQUID

Mariam Rahmani

A Love Story

The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking herand her projectto Tehran.

The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid, A Love Story has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best frienda poet-turned-marketer named Adamhave turned their noses up at other peoples' riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just marry rich. But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of arranged marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a "socialist" trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County. Only a tragedy in Tehran and an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator's increasingly manic trajectory and force her to confront the contradictions of her life in Los Angeles. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she's been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time. For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Elif Batuman, Liquid, A Love Story delivers a modern dating tale like no other. Mariam Rahmani's gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting inversion of a classic romantic comedy. Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her first book-length translation, of the contemporary Iranian cult hit novel In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker. Her awards include an American Council for Learned Societies fellowship and a US Fulbright grant. She holds a PhD from UCLA and an MFA from Columbia, as well as degrees from Princeton and Oxford. She currently serves on the faculty of Bennington College.

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Book Published 2025-03-01 by Algonquin

Comments

Liquid is an absolute lifelineMariam Rahmani's prose expands what's possible on the page, with a novel that's loving, cutting, mournful, and hilarious. Rahmani knows LA and Tehran. Rahmani knows sex, pleasure, and pain. Rahmani knows loss, and care, and the stickiness in-between. Liquid is a dream of a bookwritten with heart and feeling and longing and clarity, bracingly astute, elastic, and precisean absolute delight expanding the possibilities in American fiction.

Flailing in the disparate worlds of academia, Los Angeles, and Tehran, the complex and complicated protagonist of Mariam Rahmani's electrifying debut novel is struggling to find a job and a husband, both of which prove elusive. Written with a sharp eye and warm heart, Liquid traverses a fascinating woman's circuitous route to self-discovery. An eminently memorable novel worthy of all the praise and raves it will undoubtedly receiveit literally took my breath away.

Hirsute, heuristic, and humorous, Liquid is an electric read. From Los Angeles to Tehran, past to present, academia to the bedsheets, Rahmani navigates these journeys with undeniable verve, serious street-smarts, and a glowing charismatic cool. The smoothest, smartest book I've read in quite some time and the dawning of a literary force.

Pleasures of nearly every variety abound in Mariam Rahmani's astonishing Liquid, a novel whose force seeps into the bloodstream, dilating thinking on desire and ambition, of the relations that entangle and unmake us, alongside the traces of unknowability that sustain. Pages erupt with blazing intelligence, pathos, and stringent wit. How rare it is to encounter this marriage of sociological richness with a poet's staggering feel for the capacity of language, its lush contours and bite. Traversing the streets of LA and Tehran with Rahmani at the wheel awakens sensations and appetites for which one has no name. Liquid is a potent, shimmering revelation, and Rahmani is a writer you proselytize for.

I love this book. After hilariously tearing through the faux-profundity of so many of our cultural fixationsfrom Los Angeles, to academia, to rom-comsthe novel moves to Tehran, and slowly morphs into a touching examination of vulnerability, dislocation, grief, and longing. Underneath the posturing and razor-sharp wit, we find the yearning heart and hard-won intelligence of a young woman who has found herself adrift. I couldn't stop thinking about Liquidsexy, sly, daring, and utterly brilliant. Mariam Rahmani is the most exciting new writer I've read in ages.

Brainy, swift, naughty, constantly surprising, and slyly politicala transgressive tour de force of cultural criticism, hidden inside a careening, and deftly comic, logic proof of love.