A collection of short stories by Iranian women writers that capture the fear, defiance, and enduring struggle of life under an oppressive regime.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution was an event that shocked the world. After thousands of years of Persian monarchy, the Iranian people seized power and instituted a strict secular Islamic regime. The revolution sent the despised Shah into exile, put the Ayatollah Khomeini into power, and resulted in the Iran Hostage Crisis.
In all the upheaval, little thought was given to the women who, even after helping install the new regime, would have to face a new kind of oppression in their homes and in the public square.
Here, the voices of those women are heard. Evoking the enormous isolation of daily existence, and the persistence of a people living under a repressive regime, these literary gems—many by prize-winning authors—reward us with an inside view of a turbulent and closed society.
Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone is a historian at the American University School of International Service. She teaches courses on gender and social change in the Middle East, Iran, and the history of US-Iran relations.Sara Khalili is a financial journalist, editor, and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her published translations include As Red as Fire Tasting of Smoke, Selected Poems of Siavash Kasraii; Lucky those Half-Opened Buds, Selected Poems of Fereydoon Moshiri; several short stories in Strange Times My Dear: A PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature; and various short stories by Shahriar Mandanipour. Khalili won a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant for her translation from the Farsi of Seasons of Purgatory, a selection of short stories by Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour.Faridoun Farrokh is a professor of English at Texas A&M International University. His research interests include contemporary Persian fiction, eighteenth-century English literature, and rhetoric and composition. He has published numerous articles in English and Persian and is the translator of A Mansion in the Sky and Other Stories by Goli Taraghi.