The Book of Tehran: A City in Short Fiction

Fereshteh Ahmadi · Payam Nasser · Goli Taraghi · Atoosa Afshin Navid · Kourosh Asadi · Azardokht Bahrami · Hamed Habibi · Mohammad Hosseini · Amirhossein Khorshidfar · Mohammad Tolouei

Apr 2019 · Comma Press

About this ebook

 A city of stories – short, fragmented, amorphous, and at times contradictory – Tehran is an impossible tale to tell. For the capital city of one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East, its literary output is rarely acknowledged in the West. This unique celebration of its writing brings together ten stories exploring the tensions and pressures that make the city what it is: tensions between the public and the private, pressures from without – judgemental neighbours, the expectations of religion and society – and from within – family feuds, thwarted ambitions, destructive relationships. The psychological impact of these pressures manifests in different ways: a man wakes up to find a stranger relaxing in his living room and starts to wonder if this is his house at all; a struggling writer decides only when his girlfriend breaks his heart will his work have depth... In all cases, coping with these pressures leads us, the readers, into an unexpected trove of cultural treasures – like the burglar, in one story, descending into the basement of a mysterious antique collector’s house – treasures of which we, in the West, are almost wholly ignorant.

Translated by: Sara Khalili, Sholeh Wolpé, Alireza Abiz, Caroline Croskery, Farzaneh Doosti, Shahab Vaezzadeh, Niloufar Talebi, Lida Nosrati, Susan Niazi and Poupeh Missaghi.

Foreword by Orkideh Behrouzan.

Developed in partnership with Visiting Arts.

'The aesthetic sensibility of Iranian culture appears, to the West, as mainly pre-modern, if not actually anti-modern... The fiction showcased in The Book of Tehran is a welcome corrective to this tendency... These stories feel decidedly contemporary in style and subject matter alike, with their protagonists' inner lives and interpersonal relationships at the fore.' - The Times Literary Supplement

 'Fiction exploring the interior life of contemporary Iranians is not well represented in translations readily available in the West. The Book of Tehran aims to begin to redress the shortage...' - Asian Review of Books

About the author

 Fereshteh Ahmadi is a novelist, short story writer, literary critic and editor. After studying architecture at the University of Tehran, she became a journalist in the late 1990s, and has since gone on to publish three collections of short stories: Everyone’s Sarah (2004), featuring ‘Television’, selected by the Hooshang Golshiri Foundation as one of the best short stories of the year; Hyperthermia (2013); and Domestic Monsters (2016). She has also published two novels: The Fairy of Forgetfulness (2007), finalist of the Mehregan Award and the Rouzi-Rouzegari Awards for the Bookseller’s Choice of the Best Novel, and Cheese Forest (2008), as well as a children’s book: Nameless. She works as an editor for several publishing houses and is a member of the jury of the Golshiri and Rouzi-Rouzegari awards. In 2017, Ahmadi was writer in residence at the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay.

Orkideh Behrouzan is a physician, poet, anthropologist and the author of Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran (2016, Stanford University Press). She was the 2015–16 Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the winner of the 2011 Kerr Award from the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Behrouzan’s short story ‘Binazeer’ was adapted for the stage by director Mehrdad Seyf and produced as part of the EAST15 World Performance in the UK. She helped to develop the collaborative project Beyond ‘Trauma’: Emergent Agendas for Understanding Mental Health in the Middle East, which involved an interdisciplinary Web-Hub (funded by SOAS Seed Corp Award) as well as a podcast series exploring narrations of memory in art, literature, and everyday life. She presented a TEDx talk on Rethinking Mental Health and the Afterlife of War in 2018, and is currently Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a Member of the Board of Trustees of the London Middle East Institute.