Levantine Cultural Center: West Hollywood Book FairThe Levantine Cultural Center will participate in the 9th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair on Sunday, September 26, with three authors and two booths. From 12 noon to 1 pm, the LCC presents "Tales and Adventures of the Middle East" with novelist Sasha Mostofi reading from her political thriller Cemetery of Dreams, and novelist Kamran Pasha reads from his historical novel—an unexpected romance between a Muslim and a Jew during the Crusades—Shadow of the Swords. From 2:00-2:30 pm, poet Sholeh Wolpé will sign her three books, The Scar Saloon, Rooftops of Tehran, and Sin: Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad.

Come visit our booths! Get signed copies of books about the Middle East.

The West Hollywood Book Fair is home to fourteen stages, the Writing Room, and 130 exhibitors. Eight Author Panel Stages include the Fiction Pavilion, Comics & Graphic Novels Pavilion, That's Entertainment Pavilion, Mystery & Suspense Pavilion, Good Reads Pavilion, SciFi, Fantasy & Horror Pavilion, Current Events Pavilion and the Open Book Pavilion. Six Performance Stages include the Theatre Stage, Poetry / Hybrid Stage, Storytelling & Readings Stage, Teen Stage and Kids' Stage. The Ghost Story Telling Tent includes both children's and teen/adult programming. The Writing Room hosts writing workshops all day long.

Exhbitors include General Fiction & Non-fiction book sellers (book stores and presses), Literary Organizations,  Rare and Collectible book sellers, Arts Organizations, Children's Book sellers, Theatres, Literary Journals, Comic Book sellers, The "Comics Scene!", The "Mystery Lovers' Scene" and food vendors.

Cemetery of Dreams: a novel by Sasha MostofiIn the wake of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, Arman seeks to avoid his country's political turmoil and focus on his own problems. His father, a former general under the Shah, is in the hospital. His American fiancée, Julia, the daughter of one of the hostages, is in hiding in his home and growing increasingly distraught as the crisis stretches on.

But when a former agent in the Shah's secret police blackmails him into joining a CIA-supported coup against the new regime, Arman is drawn into the revolutionary vortex.

A fast-paced political thriller set against a finely detailed historical and cultural backdrop, Cemetery of Dreams shows lower-class Iranians who used the revolution for revenge against the upper classes, patriots who joined the revolution to end the Shah's tyranny, and the opportunists who were willing to turn any political upheaval to their advantage.

With Iranian domestic turmoil once again making headlines, Cemetery of Dreams gives the reader an alternative perspective on the rescue mission, and an insider's view into the social currents that continue to fracture one of the most influential players in the Middle East, and subsequently the world.

Author Sasha MostofiSasha Mostofi was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. After the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, the Islamic regime prohibited her father, an executive at one of the major banks in Tehran, from traveling for fifteen years and stripped her family of their wealth and position. Meanwhile, many of her relatives escaped or were executed for trivial reasons.

The first in her family to immigrate to the United States, Sasha Mostofi came to America in the 1990s at the age of sixteen, with little if any financial assistance. She wrote the first draft of Cemetery of Dreams when she was fourteen years old in Iran. Visit her web site.

Shadow of the Swords: by Kamran PashaShadow of the Swords/Kamran Pasha

A saga of love and war, Shadow of the Swords: An Epic Novel of the Crusades tells the story of the Crusades—from the Muslim perspective. Saladin, a Muslim sultan, finds himself pitted against King Richard the Lionheart as Islam and Christianity clash against each other, launching a conflict that still echoes today.

In the midst of a brutal and unforgiving war, Saladin finds forbidden love in the arms of Miriam, a beautiful Jewish girl with a tragic past. But when King Richard captures Miriam, the two most powerful men on Earth must face each other in a personal battle that will determine the future of the woman they both love—and of all civilization.

Kamran PashaAt the age of three, Pasha moved from Karachi, Pakistan, his birthplace, to the primarily Hasidic Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, New York. After graduating from Dartmouth with a degree in Comparative Religion, he became a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, where he subsequently interviewed top world figures such as former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. Pasha tenrolled at Cornell Law School and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. With his joint JD/MBA degrees, he began working as an attorney at the prestigious New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood. He served as the writer and co-producer of the Emmy-nominated terrorism drama, Sleeper Cell. Pasha also holds an MFA from UCLA film school. He is a writer and producer of NBC's series Kings, which is a modern day retelling of the Biblical tale of King David. Previously he served as a writer on NBC's remake of Bionic Woman. Visit his web site.

Sholeh WolpéSholeh Wolpé is the author of Rooftops of Tehran, The Scar Saloon, and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad for which she was awarded the Lois Roth Translation Prize in 2010. Sholeh is a regional editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East edited by Reza Aslan (Norton), the editor of 2010 Iran issue of the Atlanta Review which immediately became the journal's bestselling issue, and the poetry editor of the Levantine Review, an online journal about the Middle East. Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran and has lived in the Caribbean, Europe and the U.S.. She holds Masters degrees in Radio-TV-Film (Northwestern University ) and Public Health (Johns Hopkins University ). She lives in Los Angeles. Visit her site.