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 "A Lynchian descent into the paranoia and alienation of totalitarianism, South is a haunting and dreamlike novel" --SHELF AWARENESS B, 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 defend himself against his unknown enemies, we learn about his father's disappearance, his fading love with his wife, and his encounter with an unknown woman. A puzzle-like novel about totalitarianism, surveillance, alienation, and guilt that questions the forces that control us.
Author Biography:
Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, and has been translated into Italian and Farsi. Babak was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and writes in Toronto. Shawn K. Jain is a Harvard University/Moscow Art Theater School/A.R.T. Institute graduate. Shawn has TV credits for shows on Apple TV+, CBS, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Showtime, and Peacock, and he has narrated audiobooks for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Epic!, Blackstone, GraphicAudio, and HQN. Shawn can be heard on many episodes of the romcom podcast Meet Cute and on Atypical Artists' audio dramas Life with LEO(h) and Maxine Miles. He also voiced a migrant worker for UCLA Labor Center's Re: Work Radio podcast. Sean Daniels, artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company, said he finds "few actors funnier in the world than Shawn." Prior to saying yes to his calling to be an actor, Shawn was a communications and marketing professional who did important work with organizations like the ACLU and the International AIDS Society. Born and raised in Northern California, Shawn received his BA from UC Berkeley. In addition to acting, Shawn has several pilots in development. Shawn writes stories that deal with the brokenness of people and society (even when things seem glittering and beautiful on the outside). Shawn is queer and of South Asian descent. A native English speaker who is fluent in Spanish and conversant in Hindi, Shawn can do British, Farsi, Hindi, Indian, Urdu, and Arabic accents.
