Award-winning Iranian author Zoya Pirzad's masterful short story collection—now in English for the first time.
Winner of the Courrier International Prize (2009)
In a fabric shop, a young woman waits for her fiancé to acknowledge their engagement. In a cramped apartment, a wife's sharp mimicry reveals years of silent resentment. Through the decades, a widow watches her magnificent dowry house—and the persimmon tree her father planted—become the battlefield for her inheritance.
The Bitter Taste of Persimmon captures the texture of daily life in Tehran with prose that is spare yet deeply evocative. These five stories illuminate the interior lives of women navigating tradition, expectation, and desire—where unspoken tensions simmer beneath everyday moments.
Stories included:
• Spots — A hesitant engagement unfolds through fabric shopping and pizza dinners
• The Apartment — Exhaustion and sharp mimicry reveal the fault lines in a marriage
• Persian Shawls — Memory and craft intertwine across generations
• The Harmonica — A chance encounter echoes through the years
• The Bitter Taste of Persimmon — An elegant dowry house becomes a woman's final stand
For readers of:Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and Shahrnush Parsipur.
"Pirzad's prose, in its simplicity, is extraordinarily affecting and emotionally stirring."
First published in Persian in 1997. First English translation.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Winner of the Courrier International Prize (2009)
In a fabric shop, a young woman waits for her fiancé to acknowledge their engagement. In a cramped apartment, a wife's sharp mimicry reveals years of silent resentment. Through the decades, a widow watches her magnificent dowry house—and the persimmon tree her father planted—become the battlefield for her inheritance.
The Bitter Taste of Persimmon captures the texture of daily life in Tehran with prose that is spare yet deeply evocative. These five stories illuminate the interior lives of women navigating tradition, expectation, and desire—where unspoken tensions simmer beneath everyday moments.
Stories included:
• Spots — A hesitant engagement unfolds through fabric shopping and pizza dinners
• The Apartment — Exhaustion and sharp mimicry reveal the fault lines in a marriage
• Persian Shawls — Memory and craft intertwine across generations
• The Harmonica — A chance encounter echoes through the years
• The Bitter Taste of Persimmon — An elegant dowry house becomes a woman's final stand
For readers of:Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and Shahrnush Parsipur.
"Pirzad's prose, in its simplicity, is extraordinarily affecting and emotionally stirring."
First published in Persian in 1997. First English translation.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Used availability for Zoya Pirzad's The Bitter Taste of Persimmon