Published by Asemana Books (August 19, 2025)

Stories from Tehran

Expanded edition

Fereshteh Molavi

ISBN: 978-1-997503-08-8

Thirteen stories originally written in Persian in Tehran between 1980 and 1998, and translated into English by the author herself.

From the afterword to the book, by Mahdi Ganjavi:

The stories in this volume represent a selection of Molavi’s fiction written up to 1998, prior to her immigration and the beginning of her exilic life in Canada.

Stories from Tehran stands among Fereshteh Molavi’s most essential works. With the addition of three new stories—Where is Shemr?, All the Days of God, and Appointment at Home—the collection grows in emotional intensity and thematic reach. Each piece draws from a distinct geography and sensibility: the first, a child’s search for justice and meaning in the mythic residues of Karbala and contemporary cruelty; the second, a slow-burning meditation on female endurance, bodily collapse, and the quiet dignity of a woman’s laboring life in Baluchistan; and the third, a chamber piece of war-haunted intimacy, where a father and daughter cling to stories and each other amid the threat of annihilation. Together, these stories deepen Molavi’s exploration of memory, care, violence, and the aching desire to remain human amid history’s erasures. They remind us that literature, like mourning, is an act of fidelity to what refuses to be silenced.

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About the Author:

Born in Tehran in 1953, Fereshteh Molavi lived and worked there until 1998 when she immigrated to Canada. She worked and taught at Yale University, University of Toronto, York University, and Seneca College. A fellow at Massey College and a writer-in-residence at George Brown College, Molavi has published many works of fiction and non-fiction in Persian in Iran and Europe. She has been the recipient of awards for novel and translation. Her first book in English, Stories from Tehran, was released in 2018; and her most recent novel, Thirty Shadow Birds, was published by Inanna Publications in 2019. She lives in Toronto.

Photo Credit: Jamie Brand

Endorsements

If you transport Joyce’s Dubliners to Teheran and exchange his typically feckless, emotionally stunted, and pretentious men for mature, passionate, and sophisticated women you have a sense of this remarkable collection. What is more, Iranian author, Fereshteh Molavi, cleaves to a pristine Joycean narration lodged deep within each character’s head. She allows herself no concessions, no authorial interventions, no deviations from this strict discipline. She opens a window for us onto a complex human interior, a consciousness both serious and playful, as concerned with the mundane as the rarefied. Such a mind ranges with lightening speed from domestic concerns and constraints (a meal to cook, a sick child to attend, a job to do, extended family to placate) to matters of high philosophical and religious import. What is more, this associative energy thrums with a longing for erotic release. While not dwelling on the politics of patriarchy, Molavi makes it press all the harder by making us actually feel the intellectual and emotional resistance her women mount against it. Far from suffering a Joycean paralysis, they are pure agency within. 

–Peggy O’Brien, Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Stories from Tehran is a collection of short stories that reveals with remarkable caring, and artistic sincerity, the complex turmoil of a society where religion has become political, dissent is silenced, and individuals are crushed under pressure of daily life.  

Molavi is an accomplished writer whose prose is observant and frank, glancing details in a language that is simple but rich with meaning. Her disillusionment with direction Iran has taken is captured in stories about women from different backgrounds, offering glimpses into their lives with insights of a social and cultural critic.

Stories from Tehran reflects the two worlds of memories and unbound imagination, both personal and cultural about place and displacement. “She closes her eyes, crosses her arms, and tries to make a live image out of a pale illusion of a memory by blotting out her surroundings. Her memory still works well; more or less as well as it did during those bygone years, when she could deposit unwieldy words from piles of bulky books, and take them out as needed. Yet describing the past in her mind is like pouring cold water over it, not warmly imagining herself in it.”

While each of the stories is distinct, they are linked in exploring fragility of life and problems of common humanity of love, loss, war, and violence, richly revealing of a period of rapid political and social change.

–Fera Simone, Professor, American University, Washington