But during the research process, I discovered an embarrassment of riches, and came to realize that what has always made this literature seem peripheralized to me is not in the quality or quantity of available works, but in their positioning-as a literature of other. I embarked on this list with an assumption of scarcity. Since this list is a tip of the iceberg of the growing body of works by this subset, it is fair to assume that there is a significant body of literature here to warrant a major category and literary tradition of its own that contributes to the canon of world literature, however that canon is defined, its native environment the world itself. Waves of migration out of Iran since 1979 have effectively resulted in the formation of a new literature.

This list also celebrates that despite challenges -which only show just how much further we can go to champion this literature -the abundance of literature by writers of Iranian descent, both at home in Iran and abroad, available in English is astonishing. This list resists the following circumstances-ones that literature written by Iranians inside and outside of Iran by authors of Iranian descent, in Persian, English or any other language Iranian diasporic authors write in, faces to be available in English: suppression by the Shah’s regime before the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic after the lack of Iranian government subsidies the fact that Iran hasn’t signed the 1886 Berne Copyright Convention that protects literary and artistic works by providing creators with the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms, and because there’s no copyright treaty between Iran and the US, works by Iranian authors first published in Iran fall immediately into the public domain in the United States sanctions that limit legal pathways for giving Iranian authors any compensation, or exporting any service to Iran, paid or not the general limited interest in translated works as well as availability of translators and productions that appropriate, commodify, frame and reframe, or sensationalize this literature, thereby raising Western readers that will only seek to understand the East through those lenses.

The blind owl and other stories