• King of the Benighted
  
  "King of the Benighted is a book that transcends the limitations of time and space to explore the very essence of the human soul. . . . This book is a must for anyone interested in Persian literature."
  - -Small Press Magazine

  "A thoroughly contemporary work, a lament for a lost utopia and an elliptical and bleakly horrific account of incarceration and torture in the Iran of the Mullahs."
  - - Times Literary Supplement

  "An account of an intellectual experience with a political revolution and its consequences. Eminently readable and meaningful. . . . a revealing work, related in the terse and compact style characteristic of a superb and sophisticated modern writer."
  - - World Literature Today

  "The restraint of the writing and the character of the poet, idealistic and unpolitical, make this a story to be read on many levels. It is a terrible indictment of a contemporary regime, but it is equally an allegory about the loss of innocence and hope."
  - - Kirkus Reviews
  

• Black Parot, Green Crow: A Collection of Short Fiction
  

"HOUSHANG GOLSHIRI (1937-2000) was a master stylist who wrote dense, elliptical prose, often with a (more or less) disguised political content...One of Golshiri's favorite literary devices is an interior monologue or dialogue, in which the narrator, generally but not always male, speaks mostly to himself or carries on a dialogue with someone not present. Sometimes the narration takes the form of a letter. Many of his stories must be read with careful attention to determine who is speaking, who is responding, and what they are talking aboutt...Here, Golshiri indulges in another of his favorite devices, a thinly disguised parallel with a narrative from classical Persian poetry or with popular stories of the death of the Imam Hoseyn at Karbala, Iraq, in 680 C.E. One drawback of this sort of writing is that it takes considerable knowledge of Persian culture and literature to understand what some stories mean and why they resonate so profoundly with Iranians today. The translations are uniformly good, and one must be grateful to the editor for bringing out this excellent collection by one of the most influential twentieth-century Persian writers."

-- World Literature Today
William L. Hanaway, University of Pennsylvania