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It is important to note that these interviews were carried out in the last days of Mohammad Khatami's presidency—the reformist politician under whose administration the Ministry of Islamic Guidance loosened its grip on art and literature to some degree. The free manner in which the writers in this book speak about their work in post-revolutionary Iran is to some extent due to the relatively tolerant atmosphere during Khatami’s two terms of presidency (1997–2001; 2001–2005). However, Khatami’s halfhearted reforms and unrealized “dialogue of civilizations” disappointed the great majority of Iranians, who had elected him as the man who would end the reign of terror from within and achieve the peaceful transition of Iran to the modern, free world. His halfhearted reforms also strengthened the reactionary, conservative power structures and paved the way for the power seizure of the regime’s reactionary, right-wing politicians and revolutionary guards under the leadership of Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. During Khatami’s presidency many writers, poets, intellectuals, and members of the opposition were assassinated both in and outside Iran at the hands of the reactionary wing before the eyes of a helpless president. The very fact that this book was closely examined by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance for over a year, only to be found unfit for publication, testifies that the changes under Khatami were more or less cosmetic. The poets and writers who are interviewed in this book draw the attention of the reader to the precarious situation that they live and work in. Many of them are bitter about the assassinations and “accidents” that have taken their fellow writers and thinkers away from them both in and out of Iran and many of them acknowledge they might be next. In March 2010 one of the interviewees in this book, Simin Behbahāni (aged 83) the grande dame of contemporary Persian poetry, was arrested at the airport in Tehran on her way to France to receive a prize for her untiring fight against despotism and oppression. Like Simin, the poets and writers in Iran speak out and unwaveringly maintain that literature’s meaning is in opening spaces of awareness in the mind of the reader and pockets of freedom in society.