Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime

Winner of the inaugural Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature, Reza Ghassemi’s darkly comic and subtly provocative novel of life among the exiled and expatriated. Iranian exile Yadollah is barely scraping by in 1990s Paris. He lives in a run-down attic apartment with his friend Seyyed, and his girlfriend Ra’na. It’s an all too common situation—their apartment building houses a cast of eccentric neighbors, most of them fellow down-on-their-luck exiles from all over the world. When a mysterious new neighbor arrives on the scene, a man who ominously goes by the name of Prophet, Yadollah and his friends’ world is turned upside down. Yadollah suddenly finds himself confronted by the Islamic angels of death, and realizes that he must untangle the mystery of his own murder, which occurred at some unknown point after Prophet’s arrival. Suspenseful, yet darkly humorous, Woodwind Harmony In The Nighttime explores the trauma of displacement, and challenges readers to piece together the story of a life shattered by exile.

Reza Ghassemi is an Iranian musician, playwright and novelist. His plays, which won prestigious awards in Iran, were banned after the Islamic Revolution. He has since lived in exile in France, where he has pursued his career as a musician and writer with more freedom. In 2002, he was awarded the Golshiri Literary Award for Best First Novel—Iran’s most important literary prize—for Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime. Of his other two novels, The Spell Chanted by Lambs (Candle & Fog, 2015) has also been translated into English. Michelle Quay is a scholar, researcher and translator of Persian literature. She teaches Persian language and literature, in addition to Iranian cinema and culture, at Brown University in Providence, RI. She holds a PhD in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Scholar. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022), and has collaborated on scholarly translations of medieval Persian rhetoric manuals as a postdoctoral researcher. Meanwhile, her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Two Lines Press and elsewhere. She was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian literature in 2023. Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novels Sons & Other Flammable Objects, The Last Illusion, and Tehrangeles; the memoir Sick; and the essay collection Brown Album.