Books like Women Without Men — picked by fans

I love “Persepolis” because the author very accurately and with a great amount of humor describes, and through graphics, portrays the very heavy topic of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

She makes it easy for people who weren’t there at the time and are not a part of the culture or history to imagine what happened. I like how she describes family relationships, especially with her parents, in a tribal culture. In a very transparent way, she accurately describes the differences between private family life and the one that is portrayed publicly.

I think the title pulled me toward this book. I knew it was about a carpetmaker in 17th-century Persia, and I guessed that the blood of flowers might refer to the dye used to color the wool for the rugs.

I found this way of describing dye to be extremely evocative. As it turns out, that was only the beginning of my fascination with this beautiful book. Following a young woman in the beautiful city of Isfahan, I had no idea that I would learn so much about the process of making carpets. I even found myself looking up ancient and medieval Persian carpet photos online (they’re amazing!).

The protagonist manages to do some extremely stupid things, and at one point, I found myself yelling at her. But she matures. That character development from an immature and reckless young girl to a strong, self-reliant woman was really lovely to experience. 

The choices Forugh Farrokhzad made shocked me at times, which made the story even more compelling. This Iranian poet broke my heart with her desperation to live her life true to herself. I’m gutted by the fact that in another country, Forugh wouldn’t have needed to make such drastic choices to be a poet and a woman with dreams and needs.

Listening to the story read by Mozhan Marno, a favorite actress of mine, magnified the intensity of the story. Feminism takes many forms and is highly impacted by our surroundings. This story made me dig deep into how far I’d push my personal boundaries for what I believe in. I will read anything Jasmin Dapzink publishes.

This is a memoir by a 32-year-old Iranian-American journalist who, in 2009, was accused and sentenced to 8 years in Evin Prison for being an American spy. Paraphrasing my review in The San Francisco Chronicle, Saberi's skillful reconstruction of dialogue leads to a spot-on chronicle of the paranoia and utter buffoonery of the Iranian government and its apparatchiks. I was especially impressed by the way she survives her time in solitary confinement – the resources of her mind that keep her sane. Beyond that, this memoir is a kind of coming-of-age story for those of us in the diaspora who can be a bit naïve about how safe we are as journalists and US citizens in dictatorships. Saberi is freed after 4 months, thanks to international pressures, but she’s haunted by those she met in prison who are left behind. 

I well remember following the sequence of events–a terrible fire that killed 430 trapped in a cinema in Abadan, riots, mass shootings by the army, strikes, politicization, and Islamicization of students–which culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Like many others I was both excited and filled with foreboding at the time. To read Desmond Harney’s eyewitness account is to be carried right into the middle of things. I was utterly gripped as the Iranian middle classes grasped at forlorn hopes and as those hopes faded away in the face of the ‘single-mindedness, implacability, fierce puritanism and commanding authority’ of Ayatollah Khomeini. 

In my view, Josef provides the best introduction to the history of Persia in classical antiquity–something well worth knowing, given the importance of Iran now and the influence of the past on the present.

Iranians look back with pride to those centuries when three Persian empires dominated the Middle East and western Asia. The book is clear, readable, and not too long.

I like it because he attends first and foremost to the evidence, what he calls ‘testimonies,’ and because he focuses on fundamental factors rather than simply telling a story.

This monumental two-volume collection, published in 2021, contains 110 accessible essays by some of the most prominent scholars of Achaemenid Persian history. It introduces the ancient evidence, including written sources, artistic materials, and archaeological remains, for every major region from the Indus to the Nile and the Aegean, and ably surveys the disciplinary history of the modern study of ancient Iran.  Thematic chapters trace numerous aspects of Persia’s imperial world, including geography, languages, gender, religion, court dynamics, administration, communications, war, diplomacy, economics, art, science, and many more. The narrative chapters place the empire’s rise and fall, including but hardly limited to the Persian-Greek wars, into a longer context of Ancient Near Eastern empire formation, setting up valuable insights through comparison with Assyria, Babylonia, and other predecessors. 

The Persian empire’s size and diversity impose special challenges for modern study. The major sources are written in a wide variety of ancient languages, including Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and many texts were initially studied in specialist publications with limited accessibility outside a small circle of scholars. Kuhrt’s sourcebook did a tremendous service to scholars and students alike by gathering reliable translations of a wide range of written evidence from the Persian empire, replete with supporting notes and bibliography for further reading. It includes substantial selections from Greek historians of Persia, including Herodotus, Xenophon, and the Alexander biographers, but ensures that readers are able to contextualize these texts alongside internal materials reflecting the full diversity of Persian empire and society. 

Hedayat (1903-1951) was an Iranian writer who knew that death and the mythic experience of Kairos time exists a hair’s breadth away from what we commonly experience as human life.

The Blind Owl was the book that gave me permission to write fiction: instead of writing a novel in standard form, I wanted to create a liminal space, a threshold world between real and unreal; to invite readers into an unfamiliar (and hopefully transformative) vision of humanity.

This is exactly what Hedayat does in The Blind Owl: we are immersed in a fable of otherworldly, repetitive, poetic, dark, and mesmerising power. The story (of jealousy, despair, the cyclical nature of life and death) has a rare depth and a sense of universal reach precisely because it has one foot in the liminal.

My favorite line from this book is “When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings.”

I appreciated this book when I read it the first time, and I recently re-read it. Immigrant stories are half-and-half: how it was there, and how it is here. For those of us who are second or third-generation, we rely upon those who remember or record how it was there. 

Often those stories focus on only the good things, omitting the trauma. Hakakian wonderfully balances the memories of Iran in its beauty and ugliness. This is an excellent snapshot of revolution-era Iran and how Jews were able to interact with their Muslim neighbors before and after the fall of the Shah.