Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians describes a famous explorer forced to perform as “the lion of the hour” in the drawing room of a great country estate. For this earnest scientist and adventurer, it’s a painful humiliation for him to don white tie and attempt polite conversation with idle aristocrats who have no clue where he has been or what he has achieved. Arminius Vambéry, who in the course of his life wore many different costumes, put on many masks and cycled through the world’s religions, enjoyed nothing better than regaling a society drawing room with his tales of the exotic orient. He made a career out of being “lion of the hour”. Anabel Loyd’s new biography of Vambéry painstakingly and thoughtfully explores how Vambéry pulled this off. 

Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel, Mirage, a psychological thriller that reflects life in contemporary Iran.

We know a lot about Isfahan in the 17th century. Poets and court chroniclers praised its beauty and recorded its expansion under the great monarch, Shah Abbas (1588-1629). European travelers like John Chardin and Pietro della Valle left us picturesque descriptions of its monuments and people. Artists painstakingly recorded the city-scape. Scholars have long studied its architecture and urbanism. In recent years, Kathryn Babayan has delved into the letters and diaries of its citizens. Now Farshid Emami tries to pull all these threads together and answer the question: what was it like to live in Shah Abbas’s Isfahan?

The history of Iran’s rich musical culture presents a paradox. On the one hand, there is a distinctive Persian style of music, different from its Arab, Turkish, Central and South Asian neighbors. It has its own modes, its own vocal styles, its favorite instruments, its own performance genres. On the other hand, for many centuries the frontiers of Iran were fluid; a series of wars and revolutions transported its cultural centers from east to west and back again. At times the royal court existed only in camps, and indeed the musicians, dancers and singers lived in tents as well. Foreign invasions and conquest of adjacent countries brought a steady supply of musicians from exogenous traditions: Indians, Georgians, Armenians. And from time to time, Islamic rigorism banned music altogether. So what is Iranian music and how did it survive over the centuries?

Divided into two parts set in Iran and the US respectively, Dare the Sea is a new collection of stories from Iranian-American writer Ali Hosseini.  The stories, some of which had previously appeared in Guernica, Antioch Review and Story Quarterly, explore Iran’s landscape, culture and how cataclysmic, socio-political changes have shaped the identity and sense of belonging among Iranians living in Iran and the United States.

The twenty-three women photographers featured in Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh’s Breathing Space: Iranian Women Photographers shed light on the state of contemporary photography from Iran. Etehadieh is the founder of Silk Road Gallery, Iran’s first gallery devoted exclusively to photography. Many of the photographers featured in this book have previously exhibited their works at her gallery in Tehran.

In 1868, as now, the Middle East seemed to be a place where fortunes could be made from the region’s mineral resources and from its central location between Europe and India. The Persian empire was slowly recovering from decades of invasion, civil war, banditry, and plagues. A new monarch, Naseroddin Shah, made a good impression in the capitals of Europe, which he visited frequently beginning in 1873. Yet “the well-protected realm” remained mysterious. A lack of information about its people and geography challenged international investors, who still relied on John Chardin’s accounts of 150 years earlier. They were greedy for up-to-date insights into the country. Albert Houtum Schindler was their providential man.

The Book of Esther, one of the historical books in the Torah and the Old Testament, is known as a story of community, discrimination, and human ingenuity. It’s core to the Jewish holiday of Purim, with singing, feasting, and other merriment. And it’s unique as one of the few books in the Bible that doesn’t mention God. At all.