Modern Persian Short Stories
- Title
- Modern Persian Short Stories
- Translator
- Minoo S. Southgate
- Publisher
- Three Continents Press
- Place of Publication
- Washington D.C., United States
- Genre
- Anthology
- Format
- Book
- Translations In This Collection
- Seeking Absolution
- The Carrousel
- The Joyous Celebration
- A Land Like Paradise
- Teaching in a Pleasant Spring
- The Snow, the Dogs, the Crows
- Gowhartaj's Father
- Agha Julu
- Why do they go back?
- The First Day in the Grave
- The Warm South
- Of Weariness
- The End of the Passion Play
- The Historic Tower
- The Game Is Up
- Medium
- Publication Year
- 1980
- Page Number
- 228
- ISBN / ISSN
- 9780894100321
- Does the translation have images?
- No
- OTHER PEOPLE INVOLVED
- Minoo S. Southgate: Editor, Introduction
- Reviews
1
Book Self Description
MODERN PERSIAN SHORT STORIES offers 15 works of contemporary writers. Some of the stories are only vignettes, almost local color sketches. Others are complex, full of characters and tense episodes, fully plotted to their harsh denouements. The Western reader may be taken aback by the harshness of these stories, of their lack of sentimentality. Here there is none of the “storybook” quality of a Scheherezade or the magic of old Arabian stories. In the severe gaze of our authors, contemporary Iranian life, country or city, has an immediacy, an arrow-sharp honesty, that is almost painful. Tension and frustration seem the twins on the center of the eyeball of attention. In many ways the later stories may even be seen as coded messages, warning of strains too hard to endure, of lives lived so joylessly that cruelty was the only reaction to someone else's imagined happiness. These are works speaking from a world not wishing to be born but to be aborted. Yet, they are vivid, demanding our interest, and even our sympathy.
