Lifeguard (Absurd Tales and Minimals)

Some books hold your hand. This one shakes it once, politely, and lets go.

At eleven fifty at night, a man watches a film and accidentally meets his father for the first time. A boy signs up for swimming lessons and receives, instead, a philosophy he never recovers from. A doctor examines a patient and finds the examination quietly reversed. A word overheard in a funeral procession follows a man all the way to the back of an ATM queue.

Nothing in this collection ends the way you’ve been trained to expect — because nothing in it was written to meet your expectations. It was written to leave a mark.

Lifeguard — the first volume of Absurd Tales and Minimals — gathers short stories and “minimals”: fictions compressed to a page or less, built in the tradition of Kafka’s parables, Borges’s puzzles, and the modern Persian short story at its sharpest. Some are comedies wearing dark coats. Some are dark coats wearing comedies. Several are over before you realize what they’ve done, which is rather the point.

Here you’ll find bookshops crueler than restaurant kitchens, dedications addressed to frogs and fried eggs, marriages that end in fur, mustaches worth half a life, mountains that keep what falls into them, and villages that have made a private peace with something they never speak of. You’ll find doctors, shepherds, writers, sheep, and cats — all of them taking their situations perfectly seriously, which is what makes them so funny, and so quietly devastating.

A word of honest warning before you buy:

If you need a hero’s journey, a likable protagonist who learns and grows, a romance subplot, or an ending that resolves — this is not that book. No tidy arcs. No explanations. These stories trust you with the ending instead of handing you one, and readers who prefer being handed things tend to leave unhappy.

But if you’ve ever finished a story and sat still for a moment, unsure whether to laugh or grieve — if you read Etgar Keret, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, or Chekhov and think more of this, but stranger — if you suspect the world’s real drama happens slightly to the left of where everyone is looking — then welcome. You’re exactly who this was written for.

What readers of this kind of fiction can expect:

— Stories rooted in Iran’s cities, hospitals, mountain roads, and crowded apartments — and in the interior landscape every reader recognizes
— Absurdism played entirely straight, satire delivered deadpan, tenderness arriving from unexpected directions
— Flash fictions you can read in two minutes and will think about for two weeks
— Endings that close like a door quietly pulled shut

The comic and the tragic, in these pages, are next-door neighbors who share a thin wall. Sometimes you can hear one laughing through it. Sometimes you can’t tell which one it is.

Volume 1 of Absurd Tales and Minimals. Approximately 25,000 words. Complete in itself — no cliffhangers, on principle.

Start reading, and see which side of the wall you’re on.