A Mixture of Fiction and Memoir from Iranian Women
Explore a captivating blend of fiction and memoir with these powerful books by Iranian women. Discover unique voices, personal stories, and cultural insights in this curated collection.
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Touba and the Meaning of Night
by ShahrnĆ«sh PÄrsÄ«ÊčpĆ«r
Banned in Iran, this epic masterpiece of dissident Iranian woman writer finally arrives in the U.S.
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The Blood of Flowers
by Anita Amirrezvani
After her father dies without leaving her with a dowry, a seventeenth-century Persian teen becomes a servant to her wealthy rug designer uncle in the court of Shah Abbas the Great, where her weaving talents prove both a blessing and curse.
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The Bathhouse
by Farnoosh Moshiri
With intense emotion and great literary skill, Farnoosh Moshiri has written one of the most moving novels to come out in years. The story begins with the arrest of a seventeen-year-old girl in the early days of the fundamentalist revolution in Iran. Imprisoned because of her brother's involvement with leftist politics, she is placed in a makeshift jail, a former bathhouse, in which other women are held captive. With a gripping narrative, Moshiri gives voice to these prisoners, exploring their torment and struggle, but also their courage and humanity, in the face of tyrants.
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Saffron Sky
by Galareh Asayesh
This lyrical memoir evinces the author's passion for constructing an American life with the spiritual fervor and deeply aesthetic rituals that were part of her childhood in Iran. Asayesh, who immigrated to North Carolina as a girl, writes too of her struggle to arrive at an acceptable sexuality in the face of parental panic, and tells of her frustration, during later trips to post-Shah Iran, with "the sisters," the Ayatollah's ubiquitous enforcers of female modesty.
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Honeymoon in Tehran
by Azadeh Moaveni
Powerful and poignant, "Honeymoon in Tehran" is a stirring, trenchant, and deeply personal chronicle of two years in the maelstrom of Iranian life.
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Camelia
by Camelia Entekhabifard
Camelia Entekhabifard was six years old in 1979 when the shah of Iran was overthrown by revolutionary supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. By the age of sixteen, Camelia was a nationally celebrated poet, and at eighteen she was one of the youngest reformist journalists in Tehran. Just eight years later she was imprisoned, held in solitary confinement, and charged with breaching national security and challenging the authority of the Islamic regime. Camelia is both a story of growing up in post-revolutionary Tehran and a haunting reminder of the consequences of speaking the truth in a repressive society.
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The Septembers of Shiraz
by Dalia Sofer
In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer. And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger. A page-turning literary debut, The Septembers of Shiraz simmers with questions of identity, alienation, and love, not simply for a spouse or a child, but for all the intangible sights and smells of the place we call home.
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Prisoner of Tehran
by Marina Nemat
Nemat tells the heart-pounding story of her life as a young girl in Iran during the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini's brutal Islamic Revolution--arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for "political crimes."--From publisher description.
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Funny in Farsi
by Firoozeh Dumas
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER âą Finalist for the PEN/USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the Audie Award in Biography/Memoir This Random House Readerâs Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner! âRemarkable . . . told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality . . . In the end, what sticks with the reader is an exuberant immigrant embrace of America.ââSan Francisco Chronicle In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her fatherâs glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumasâs wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?âa complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?âan even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozehâs parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they donât get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi). Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughingâwithout an accent. Praise for Funny in Farsi âHeartfelt and hilariousâin any language.ââGlamour âA joyful success.ââNewsday âWhatâs charming beyond the humor of this memoir is that it remains affectionate even in the weakest, most tenuous moments for the culture. Itâs the brilliance of true sophistication at work.ââLos Angeles Times Book Review âOften hilarious, always interesting . . . Like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, this book describes with humor the intersection and overlapping of two cultures.ââThe Providence Journal âA humorous and introspective chronicle of a life filled with loveâof family, country, and heritage.ââJimmy Carter âDelightfully refreshing.ââMilwaukee Journal Sentinel â[Funny in Farsi] brings us closer to discovering what it means to be an American.ââSan Jose Mercury News
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The Blindfold Horse
by Shusha Guppy
In an eloquent memoir, the author recreates the lost world of her childhood--a Persia delicately balanced between traditional Islamic life and the transforming forces of westernization--before the oil boom and the eventual overthrow of the Shah. Reprint.
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Journey from the Land of No
by Roya Hakakian
An emotional, evocative coming-of-age story about one deeply intelligent and perceptive girlâs attempt to find her own voice in prerevolutionary Iran âAn immensely moving, extraordinarily eloquent, and passionate memoir.ââHarold Bloom Roya Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a household that hummed with intellectual life. Family gatherings were punctuated by witty, satirical exchanges and spontaneous recitations of poetry. But the Hakakians were also part of the very small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening its grip. It is with the innocent confusion of youth that Roya describes her discovery of a swastikaââa plus sign gone awry, a dark reptile with four hungry clawsââpainted on the wall near her home. As a schoolgirl she watched as friends accused of reading blasphemous books were escorted from class by Islamic Society guards, never to return. Only much later did Roya learn that she was spared a similar fate because her teacher admired her writing. Hakakian relates in the most poignant, and at times painful, ways what life was like for women after the country fell into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who had declared an insidious war against them, but we see it all through the eyes of a strong, youthful optimist who somehow came up in the world believing that she was different, knowing she was special. A wonderfully evocative story, Journey from the Land of No reveals an Iran most readers have not encountered and re-creates a time and place dominated by religious fanaticism, violence, and fear with an open heart.
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Jasmine and Stars
by Fatemeh Keshavarz
In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present day Iran provides
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Women Without Men
by ShahrnĆ«sh PÄrsÄ«ÊčpĆ«r
A modern literary masterpiece, Women Without Men creates an evocative and powerfully drawn allegory of life in contemporary Iran. With a tone that is as stark and bold, yet magical, as its elegantly drawn settings and characters, internationally acclaimed writer Shahrnush Parsipur follows the interwoven destinies of five women -- including a prostitute, a wealthy middle-aged housewife, and a schoolteacher -- as they arrive, by many different paths, to live in a garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Reminiscent of a wry fable and drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, Women Without Men depicts women escaping the narrow precincts of family and society -- only to face daunting new challenges. Shortly after the novel's 1989 publication, Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women's sexuality. Though still banned in Iran, this national best-seller was eventually translated into several languages, delighting new readers with the witty and subversive work of a brilliant Persian writer. Book jacket.
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Behind the Tall Walls
by Azar Aryanpour
Nearly two decades after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Azar Aryanpour speaks for the first time in Behind the Tall Walls, an autobiographical retrospective of the tumultuous events that resulted in the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the rise to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Her husband, the former Minister of Health and Welfare under the Shah and an American-trained orthopedic surgeon who played a role in the real-life events chronicled in Ken Follett's best-selling book On Wings of Eagles, was subsequently and wrongfully imprisoned and sentenced to life. Part memoir and part historical account, the book presents one upper-class Iranian family, members of a traditional society who became victims of the state and pawns in the transitory world of revolutionary power politics. Most of all, however, Behind the Tall Walls is the intimate story of one woman caught between clashing armies and conflicting ideologies. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 challenged America's position in the Middle East and stirred unrest throughout the world. Many books have been written about this explosive subject: books that detail the political, historical, and social dynamics behind the events and describe the global consequences of this upheaval. However, none of these works have highlighted the human dimension of the "Iranian Crisis" as intimately nor illuminated the facts as vividly as Behind the Tall Walls. This book makes an important contribution by filling a major gap in understanding the impact of the Iranian Revolution on the lives of innocent people. A rich and moving tale of war, tragedy, and pain, it is also a tale of love, hope, and triumph, which will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.
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My Name Is Iran
by Davar Ardalan
Drawing on her remarkable personal history, a National Public Radio producer brings readers the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution in America and Iran.