Steve Middendorf

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The Nights Are Qu...
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Steve Middendorf Steve Middendorf said: " The Nights are Quiet in Tehran is an excellent novel of exile, of the otherness of emigration, and of memory.

Have you ever finished a book in bed just before you were ready to fall asleep? It happened to me with this book by Shida Bazyar on my Kobo.
...more "

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"This is a quite good story on two levels: the revolutionaries Islamic and secular fighting for a change under the Shaw of Iran. Secondly the life of the emigrants who left Iran for Germany." May 30, 2026 03:52PM

 
The Weight of Ink
Steve Middendorf is currently reading
by Rachel Kadish (Goodreads Author)
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"It was getting late, time for me to put away the book for the night. I just couldn’t do it. Luckily the author gave me a spot with 10% to go where the heroines were safe both now and then. I could sleep." Feb 20, 2026 03:11PM

 
Book cover for Suttree
The steel leaks back the day’s heat, you can feel it through the floors of your shoes. Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock.
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Esi Edugyan
“kidnappers generally roamed the coast, and in the rainy, grey dusk they would stun a freed man in the street and drag him half-conscious onto a ship bound for the Southern states, to make of him a slave again. This was not the only hazard, though it was the worst of them. White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates.”
Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

“Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?”
Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

Giacomo Leopardi
“Times of trouble demand not tears but counsel.]”
Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

Mathias Énard
“I light a cigarette to put off the journey till later / To put off all journeys till later / To put off the entire universe till later.” The entire universe is in a bookcase, no need to go out: what’s the point of leaving the Tower, said Hölderlin, the end of the world has already taken place, no reason to go experience it yourself; you linger, your fingernail between two pages (so soft, so creamy) where Álvaro de Campos, the engineer dandy, becomes more real than Pessoa, his flesh-and-blood double. Great are the deserts and everything is desert.”
Mathias Énard, Compass

Giacomo Leopardi
“Passions, deaths, storms, etc., give us great pleasure in spite of their ugliness for the simple reason that they are well imitated, and if what Parini says in his Oration on poetry1 is true, this is because man hates nothing more than he does boredom, and therefore he enjoys seeing something new, however ugly.”
Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

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