Waking Nightmares: Stories from Iran

Words, words, words . . . For a nation endowed with the art (in both negative and positive connotations) of word production, it is ironic that her authors, her eloquent Scheherazades, have been author-ized to be silenced, for the very sake of survival. Waking Nightmares belongs to a nation that shuns dialogue and is shrunk into interior or dramatic monologues. It is hard to make your voice heard to the world when you have been unable to make it heard to your own people, since you have been harassed and hushed for so long that Silence has become a mandatory temperament, and has crept deep into your collective unconsciousness, and has been developed into a holy institution. The seven chilling, haunting, and macabre short narratives here are deliriously dreamed or daydreamed by a troubled, traumatized, phobic persona; a reclusive and nocturnal wanderer of town alleyways and empty streets. They explore the nightmarish predicament of the post-revolutionary Iran; the repressed, alienated, frustrated, inactive, and silenced generation of revolution, during the dark decade of 1990s in Iran.

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