Reza Ghassemi is an Iranian musician, playwright and novelist. His plays, which won prestigious awards in Iran, were banned after the Islamic Revolution. He has since lived in exile in France, where he has pursued his career as a musician and writer with more freedom. In 2002, he was awarded the Golshiri Literary Award for Best First Novel--Iran's most important literary prize--for Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime. Of his other two novels, The Spell Chanted by Lambs (Candle & Fog, 2015) has also been translated into English.

Michelle Quay is a scholar, researcher and translator of Persian literature. She teaches Persian language and literature, in addition to Iranian cinema and culture, at Brown University in Providence, RI. She holds a PhD in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Scholar. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022), and has collaborated on scholarly translations of medieval Persian rhetoric manuals as a postdoctoral researcher. Meanwhile, her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Two Lines Press and elsewhere. She was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian literature in 2023.

Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novels Sons & Other Flammable Objects, The Last Illusion, and Tehrangeles; the memoir Sick; and the essay collection Brown Album.

"A great classic of the Iranian postmodernist canon, full of extraordinary everything." --Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles and Sick

"Language, philosophers tell us, is not merely a tool of our thoughts and emotions but their organic component. Philosophers also tell us that exiles are custodians of "dead treasures" and losing one's language is an often-inevitable part of the agonies of exile. Reza Ghassemi offers at once both a description of the pains of the Iranian exilic experience and a path for soothing, if not transcending it. He is an artist of myriad talents. A master tar player, a consummate composer, an innovative novelist whose passion for innovation equals his immersion in the traditions of Iranian and global modernities. In a dazzling text of rich allusions, almost rhythmic pace, and acute observations he masterfully describes the agonies of exile and the redemptive power of literature in describing our common humanity." --Abbas Milani, author of The Shah

"A fantastical and many-layered roller-coaster of displacement and redemption, funny and haunting by turns, with a thrilling edge of subversiveness. I enjoyed every bit of the ride, attempting along with the narrator to solve the mystery of exactly what has happened, and is happening, and why. Applause to translator Michelle Quay for her careful and delightful rendering, which retains all the sparkling wit and musicality for which Persian storytelling is known." --Tina Kover, translator of Disoriental

"Sometimes exile means trading the big, cruel world for a smaller universe of the sad and desperate stranded on the top floor of an aging Parisian apartment building. Reza Ghassemi's decidedly unharmonious Persian-Parisian symphony ricochets through its impossible but profoundly believable movements in Michelle Quay's utterly convincing translation." --Shelley Fairweather-Vega, translator of We Computers

"A great classic of the Iranian postmodernist canon, full of extraordinary everythings." -Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles and Sick

"A great classic of the Iranian postmodernist canon, full of extraordinary everything." -Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles and Sick

"Language, philosophers tell us, is not merely a tool of our thoughts and emotions but their organic component. Philosophers also tell us that exiles are custodians of "dead treasures" and losing one's language is an often-inevitable part of the agonies of exile. Reza Ghassemi offers at once both a description of the pains of the Iranian exilic experience and a path for soothing, if not transcending it. He is an artist of myriad talents. A master tar player, a consummate composer, an innovative novelist whose passion for innovation equals his immersion in the traditions of Iranian and global modernities. In a dazzling text of rich allusions, almost rhythmic pace, and acute observations he masterfully describes the agonies of exile and the redemptive power of literature in describing our common humanity." --Abbas Milani, author of The Shah

"A fantastical and many-layered roller-coaster of displacement and redemption, funny and haunting by turns, with a thrilling edge of subversiveness. I enjoyed every bit of the ride, attempting along with the narrator to solve the mystery of exactly what has happened, and is happening, and why. Applause to translator Michelle Quay for her careful and delightful rendering, which retains all the sparkling wit and musicality for which Persian storytelling is known." --Tina Kover, translator of Disoriental

"Sometimes exile means trading the big, cruel world for a smaller universe of the sad and desperate stranded on the top floor of an aging Parisian apartment building. Reza Ghassemi's decidedly unharmonious Persian-Parisian symphony ricochets through its impossible but profoundly believable movements in Michelle Quay's utterly convincing translation." --Shelley Fairweather-Vega, translator of We Computers

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Pub date: 2026-03-17

Length: 150 pages