Peyman Esmaeili was born in 1977 in Tehran. He studied electronics engineering at Iran University of Science & Technology, meanwhile he was a member of the university’s poetry club and manager of the founding board of Nationwide Students Literary Society. He is a published writer with two short story collections Snow and Cloud Symphony (winner of Mehregan, Golshiri and Press Critics & Awards) and Reach Your Raincoat Pockets (praiseworthy finalist of Isfahan Literary Award), and a novel titled The Guard (2014, 2nd). Siamak, The Guard‘s protagonist, commits murder and is consequently drawn to an incandescent white limbo in the South of Iran where he has to shoulder the weight of guilt and remorse. The magic setting of the novel – ripe with a sense of horror and fear, amalgamated with a narrative in-cold-blood – recently won him the first “40 Literary Award” (an award annually granted to the under-forty Iranian writers with a future). Here he shares his favorite reads with the Parsagoners:
PARSAGON: What are the top seven works of world literature that have influenced your life and literary career?
ESMAEILI: I have been influenced by plenty of writers, have delighted their books and sometimes turned back to some pages in their stories for revelation. Among them I can mention the following books and writers:
- Heinrich Böll’s The Clown
- J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and short stories
- Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road
- Stanisław Lem’a Solaris
- Houshang Golshiri’s short story collection Dark Hand, Bright Hand as well as the novel Prince Ehtejab
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night and Shoughterhouse-Five
- James Graham Ballard’s Crash and Empire of the Sun as well as short story collections
PARSAGON: Which seven successful Persian literary works would you recommend for translation into other languages?
ESMAEILI: Among Iranian stories I would like to mention the following, each of which has been inscribed in my mind as a pretty pattern in the art of story writing, and whose translation into other languages could help share their beauty with other people and cultures. I am trying to mostly focus on the new generation of Iranian story writers as their books provide an introduction to contemporary Iranian fiction:
- Scorpion on Andimeshk Railway Stairs and The Concert of Forbidden Tars by Hossein Mortezaeian Abkenar
- Fifty Degrees Above Zero and Roving Under Haloxylon Tress by Ali Changizi
- Laughter in the House of Solitude by Bahram Moradi
- Partridge Hunting by Reza Zangi-Abadi
- The Rituals of Restlessness by Yaghoub Yadali
- Hush and Fault Time by Mohammadreza Kateb
- Like A Scent in Breeze by Razieh Ansari
photo: Hamid Janipour | Graph Studio
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