THE POMEGRANATE LADY AND OTHER STORIES

Thanks to this selection of works by one of Iran’s bestselling and most-beloved authors she finally becomes available to a wider audience.

Goli Taraghi is a grande dame of Iranian letters and one of the contemporary masters of the short story, but her work has remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world for lack of adequate translation. Now, this seamlessly-translated collection offers her work the spotlight it so richly deserves. In the title story, "Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons," a woman on her way from Tehran to Paris must help an old womanthe Pomegranate Ladyfind her way to her sons who live in Sweden. In "The Encounter," the fate of a woman arrested at a dinner party by the Revolutionary Guards rests in the hands of someone from her past. Taraghi brilliantly evokes the particular landscape and customs of Iran, and yet her characters and their concernsloss, friendship, class, camaraderie, exile, belongingtranscend borders, raising her work to that rare status of universal, lasting literature. Writers including Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi, and Francine Prose have praised Taraghi, and she has been cited in the New York Times as an important female writer still needing translation. Taraghi was one of very few still-living writers to be included in Reza Aslam's collection of literature from the Middle East, Tablet and Pen. Her work has also been selected for the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, and Stanford University awarded her the Bita Prize for Literature and Freedom. Born in Tehran, Goli Taraghi is the author of several novels and short story collections, a rare couple of which have been translated into English or French. Stylish and warm in person, she divides her time between Tehran and Paris; she also speaks fluent English. Sara Khalili is a financial journalist, editor, and translator of contemporary Iranian literature.