Fereshteh Molavi's ​Stories from Tehran

Reviewed by Maria Meindl

(Asemana Books, 2025)

In the fall of 2025 – in what seems like another lifetime – I was approached by Mahdi Ganjavi, the publisher of Asemana Books, to say a few words at the launch of Stories from Tehran, a collection of short fiction by Fereshteh Molavi. Molavi wrote the stories in Persian between 1980 and 1988. For this volume, she translated them into English, and added three new ones. At the end of November, my husband and I made our way up to the North York Central Library in Toronto, where a crowd was gathering in the auditorium. I felt nervous, knowing I must have missed out on important cultural and historical references in the book, and this feeling only increased as a series of erudite people shared remarks in Persian and English, punctuated with a film screening and a musical performance. My own interpretation of the book differed from anything I heard that evening.

Just as my turn arrived, trays of food were delivered to the tables at the back of the room, and I offered to forego my time at the mic and let the audience eat and mingle. But no … Mahdi encouraged me to speak and everyone delayed filling their plates while I stumbled through my impostor-syndrome-infused five minutes. The warm reception for my comments touched me deeply. People were really interested in what I had to say, even though most of the book went over my head. My thoughts were valued because they offered a different viewpoint.

By the next month, protests began to form across Iran, and were met with an internet blackout, and a brutal government crackdown. On January 27th 2026, The Guardian reported that the death toll might be as high as 30,000. Then came strikes by the United States and Israel, with civilian deaths estimated at almost 1,500 by April 7th (HNRA). In the face of assaults on her homeland from within and without, Molavi’s intimate, yet far-reaching stories are more important than ever. I hope a lot of people like me, who might not be able to appreciate all the contextual nuances, still take the time to delve into these stories and appreciate them on whatever level they can.

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Remarks from November 25, 2025

When I received an invitation to speak tonight, I thought back to 2008, when we held an event at the Draft reading series featuring members of PEN Canada’s Writers in Exile. That was an exciting night for us. We had been running for just three years, and now we had the chance to host distinguished writers from different parts of the globe who had been forced to leave their countries of origin due to threats and persecution for their writing. They were in the process of building their lives and careers in Canada. Fereshteh Molavi was among them.

I have continued to admire her work, for what (it’s hard to believe) is almost twenty years. She has visited the series from time to time, sharing drafts as she continues to write and publish prolifically in both Persian and English. As someone from a completely different background, I’m aware that I appreciate only the tiniest part of what is going on in these stories, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem obtuse in my remarks. I do know that readers such as myself will find much to appreciate in Molavi’s work.
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Just as in her novel Thirty Shadow Birds (published by Inanna in 2019), Stories from Tehran blends the fantastical and the mundane, the political and the intimate. Time stretches, shrinks and folds back on itself. The dream life bleeds into the waking one. The stories are a tapestry of sensory images, infused with desire, longing, rage and joy.

"The woman washes the dishes. It is a habit. It’s a must."

“That Song,” the opening story in the collection, begins with a woman at a sink, scraping grease and grit off the dishes with her hands. This combines with the pain and irritation of an insect bite on her back. She is trapped in the task and in her own skin, an endless cycle. The dishwashing liquid doesn’t cut the grease but somehow makes her hands raw. In the course of the story, a chore becomes a waking nightmare.

The women in this book feel inescapable, irritating sensations. Sounds are amplified, images melt and distort as in a fever dream. These are hypervigilant characters, their senses magnified. They spend a lot of time waiting. Yet this attentiveness to sensation feeds into a rich inner life, and in that lies resilience.

In “Offence,” we see a woman shopping during Ramadan. In a world of lineups and shortages, she collects her supplies, carrying a bag of defrosting chicken in its pool of blood. We see her doing the most ordinary of tasks, yet at no point can we trust that the realism of the story (or perhaps the sanity of the character) won’t be punctured. The heavy bags threaten to carry her shoulder blades down to the ground, even “beneath the ground.” But then again, she exists in a world gone mad. She watches women being taken into a morality squad car to have their makeup washed off, an echo of the clothing checks she herself went through in high school. We see the long-term effect of repressive policies on a woman’s very grasp of reality. Her daily functioning is heroic.
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Without little-to-no knowledge of Persian literature, I made associations with writers who are more familiar to me. Though the scale and type of oppression can't be compared, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” came to mind as I read these stories, not just in the breakdown of sanity but in the claustrophobia. “Khodadad is Happy” begins: “The door does not lead out, and the window, a mat draped across it, does not admit anything except noise and dust. I am falling down the well of my room, my cage, my crypt.” Sounds are especially keen. In the same story, we hear 

​The crash of picks and axes coming from the house next door, the short croak of a lone crow, the squeal of a motorbike turning at the lane’s dead end, the long howl of the abandoned puppy in a corner of the desolate vacant lot, the groan and moan of a second-hand dealer’s old pick-up truck, the rat-a-tat of a woman’s heels, the crackle and scuff of a child’s slippers on the sidewalk.

In “The Yellow Station,” the point of view travels between characters, unified by synesthesia. Music notes are visible. An accordionist plays in a window and “like grey birds, the notes fly disturbed out of the window frame.” Emotions have colour. “Love is red.” Magical elements don’t come from the outside, in these stories. They emerge from the grit of daily life, from itchy skin and a dirty sink of dishes, from the dampness under a chador and the difficulty of tying a headscarf, from a spilled scoop of ice cream, a snoring husband.  

Particularly vivid are the portrayals of female friendship, which illuminate the different pathways that lives can take. “Every Orange Flower in Spring” depicts a bond between two girls during a time before they lose their wildness, their joy in moving their bodies. Zahra Jan climbs trees, collects worms, hunts cockroaches. On her wedding day, she and her friend share a stick of gum. Zahra Jan becomes a bride, then a widow, but remains a child.

My all-time favourite piece of Molavi’s prose, “Lady Without a Lapdog” begins with a page-long, single-sentence description of a woman contending with a headscarf. While she has remained in her country and become an assistant judge under a new regime, her friend Azita has left to live in California. The story shows their meeting at a conference. As Azita remarks: “Although we exiles don’t cover our entire bodies, we cover our spirit.” Time shifts back and forth from a long plane flight they take together, to their high school years, and another meeting in the meantime. Or is it an imaginary one? A character bearing the name of Chekhov’s Gurov also makes an appearance, the lived and unlived lives blending into each other and ending on a note of ennui.

​The women portrayed in this book have their agency curtailed by oppressive circumstances, but their feelings remain undimmed, and they maintain rich, imaginative inner lives. In the hands of Fereshteh Molavi, this faithful and detailed rendering of women’s consciousness becomes a subversive act. 

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Maria Meindl is the author of a memoir, Outside the Box, a novel, The Work, and many short fiction and non-fiction pieces, including in The Temz Review. In 2005, she founded the Draft Reading Series, which is still going strong after 20 years. She teaches Feldenkrais movement classes, and runs a webinar series called The Work, Straight Talk on Craft and Method, about the history of wellness, fitness and performer-training methods.