Daneshvar's Playhouse: A Collection of Stories. This item is unavailable.Daneshvar's Playhouse: A Collection of Stories

In this rich collection of short stories, Daneshvar captures the essence of a rich traditional culture undergoing change: A child lost in a bazaar, a young woman who forsakes her husband, children, and home just to own a car, a traditional theater where the play and the players act on many levels, a colonel's allegience passing from the Shah to Khomeini, an old woman's memories, and a moving chronicle of the final days of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the author's husband. Simin Daneshvar draws from over a thousand years of Persian storytelling tradition and combines this with modern techniques of short fiction and cinema. The result is both entertaining and a key of uncompromising honesty, rich detail, and a dazzling range of voices that guides the reader into the center of a complex society and its concerns.

SIMIN DANESHVAR was born in 1921 in Shiraz. She received her Ph.D in Persian literature from Tehran University and worked with Wallace Stegner as a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University. Her collection of collection of short stories published in 1948 was the first by an Iranian woman writer, and Savashun was the first novel ever published by an Iranian woman; it is the best-selling novel in Iranian history. She lives in Tebran and continues to write.