Writing before and since the Iranian Revolution, Goli Taraghi publishes both in Iran and abroad. In this collection of stories, she poignantly describes her childhood in Tehran and portrays the experience of exile with her family. She was one of the first Iranian women to receive critical recognition as well as popularity for her short stories and novels. Although Taraghi avoids sensational experimentation, her narratives sparkle with a freshness of style and sensitivity. Whether she writes of a child tip-toeing through a room of delicate Persian furnishings or of a grandmother remembering those treasured lost objects, the room becomes alive for the reader. Taraghi rejects a political stance in her writings, but, at the same time, she comments with understated humor and wisdom on the social and cultural value system of her characters. After Taraghi left the patriarchal society of post-revolutionary Iran, she proceeded to make her work more autobiographical. Several of the stories in this collection deal with the acculturation process of moving after experiencing the heartbreak of uprooting and displacement. As a whole, these recent stories demonstrate a trend in which Taraghi views her creative self unflinchingly as feminine. Her work becomes richer and more complex as a result of this transformation. Translator Faridoun Farrokh gives the stories context and critical insight in an excellent introduction. He presents an easy-reading translation without losing the delightful Persian flavor of Taraghi's words.

A Mansion in the Sky: And Other Short Stories (CMES Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation)

Literature & Fiction

Taraghi, Goli

Short Stories & Anthologies

Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

These lively fictional tales offer an unusual perspective on Iranian life and society. Told by a high-spirited, intelligent, willful (if sometimes insecure) teenage girl, they recount incidents in her daily life in Iran in the 1970s before the Revolution. Without any ideological "message," they present human interest and social comment. Their central characteristic is humor, from slapstick to subtlety, which can be easily appreciated across cultural boundaries.   As we meet Suri's immediate family, distant relatives, and friends, we are discreetly introduced to upper-middle-class society in an Iran undergoing headlong westernization. The contradictions between this process and traditional Iranian mores are particularly well depicted. Much writing in recent years has been concerned with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. This volume reminds us that there is always an ongoing human dimension largely unaffected by political and religious changes.

Suri & Co.: Tales of a Persian Teenage Girl (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Amirshahi, Mahshid

History & Criticism

On the surface of this novel, various members of a Moroccan family recount their versions of the family's experiences under the French Protectorate and since Independence. On a deeper level, the book deals with human memory and how it forms one's experience of the world. Some critics have found the Arabic original to be similar to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Outstanding Moroccan novelist and critic Mohamed Berrada first published Lu'bat al-Nisyan in 1987, and it has since been translated into French and Spanish. Called the first postmodern novel in Arabic, the story is written in such a captivating style that it has become a bestseller in the Arab world. Apart from its postmodern modes of narration and metafictional structure, the novel has elements of an autobiographical nature. Hadi, his mother, brother and other characters subtly portray the lives experienced by people from various classes and different backgrounds. The narrator and the narrator's narrator take these nuances and struggle with how a story, any story, should be told. Change in Moroccan culture and in the psyche of the main protagonist is painted artfully by the encircling wealth of detail.

The Game of Forgetting (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Berrada, Mohamed

Contemporary

This novel of the emigrant experience is a moving witness to the Lebanese people and to a time, the civil war. Emily Nasrallah's narrative follows an elderly Lebanese couple who leave their village during the war to visit children and grandchildren in the New World. The war escalates dangerously during their visit, and the couple's children are reluctant to let their parents return home. Although much of the story takes place on Prince Edward Island and in New York, the behavior and rituals of the family are those of the village in southern Lebanon. Such traditions may not be necessary to life in the New World, but are nonetheless terribly painful for emigrants to discard.

Flight against Time (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Nasrallah, Emily

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Please, No Police: A Novella (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Ören, Aras

In this moving fictional treatment of a Muslim woman's life, a personal and family crisis impells the heroine to reexamine traditional cultural attitudes toward women. Cast out and divorced by her husband, she finds herself in a strange new world. Both obstacles and support systems change as she actively participates in the struggle for Moroccan independence from France.
This feminist novel is a literary statement in a modern realist style. Many novels by women of the Middle East that have been translated reflect Western views, values, and education. By contrast, Year of the Elephant is uniquely Moroccan and emerges from North African Islamic culture itself. Its subtle juxtaposition of past and present, of immediate thought and triggered memory, reflects the heroine's interior conflict between tradition and modern demands. The title refers to a famous battle described in the Koran.

Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)

Abouzeid, Leila

Literary

The Fetishists, originally published in Arabic as Al Majus, is considered the masterpiece of Ibrahim al-Koni, one of the most prolific and important writers in Arabic today. In The Fetishists, Al-Koni explores what happens when a writer asks the novel to speak of and for the Sahara, when rival cultures clash, and when communities seek to build a utopia on Earth as individuals struggle between a desire for material well-being (represented by gold dust) and a need for spiritual meaning. As the story opens, Sultan Oragh of Timbuktu, who has already lost most of his power to Fetishist Bambara leaders of the forestlands, fears he will lose his only daughter, Tenere, as a human sacrifice to their god Amnay. The sultan sends Tenere to seek refuge with fellow Tuareg nomads in the plain. But even in their traditional, nomadic community, a competition rages between jihadi militant Islam; moderate Anhi Islam, which is the ancient Tuareg Law; and the cults of gold dust and of traditional African folk religions.
In this epic novel, Al-Koni blends Tuareg folklore and history with intense, fond descriptions of daily life in the desert, creating a mirror for life anywhere. Through its tragic rendering of a clash between the Tuareg and traditional African civilizations, the novel profoundly probes the contradictions of the human soul as it takes the reader on a unique spiritual adventure inside the Tuareg world.

The Fetishists (CMES Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation)

Al-Koni, Ibrahim

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