For years I read other people’s stories and lived
in worlds someone else had already decided the shape of. Then a
drug took the walls off one night and I made my own —
planner, participant, whole production crew — and I have not
been a guest since, so I finish them here.
Short noir novellas about people who finally
say it out loud. Every book works the same way — a door out
of the mind, a room on the other side, and the key that opened
it.
How they got out
Where they ended
What opened it
Pick a door
NoirHow cold it gets.
TransgressiveHow far past comfort it goes.
PlausibleHow much of it could actually happen.
Recommended Series
The Delgoshāدلگشا
Delgoshā means heart-opening — the word Persian keeps for a garden, and the name of the most famous one in Shiraz. It is also a surname, carried by a man who has never once opened his own. Manuchehr Delgoshā is the most famous joke writer in the country, and no one has ever heard his name — for thirty-eight years, every line he’s written has been spoken by someone else, in rooms he was never in. He built it that way at nineteen, on the conviction that a sentence with no sender cannot be prosecuted. In all that time, he has never once laughed at his own work. Then Roshanak Azimi hires him to write a speech she cannot write herself, delivers it, and afterwards says six words that make him laugh for the first time in eighteen years. Together they build Romanu, a brand with no name behind it — and when a machine is trained to write jokes just like his, Manu answers by finally publishing the ones he always refused to give away. Start anywhere: each book opens with enough of a recap to stand on its own.
Start the Series Here
All 8 Books in the Series
·······
The Unsaidناگفته
A country does not need to ban very much, so long as nobody ever has to make a decision.
A mother dreams of her dead son, and the dream is read back to her in someone else’s words. Another counts the hours while a court decides about hers. A boy sits the exam that will settle his life. A man who has judged weight by feel for thirty years wakes one morning unable to. Nobody refuses them; nobody is refused. The waiting does the work, and leaves no body, and no one to charge.
Nāgofteh is the Persian for the unsaid — not a secret, which somebody keeps, but what was never spoken at all. It belongs to nobody, so nobody can properly grieve it.
Iran, from 1979 onwards. But the real setting is an office, and offices are the same everywhere.
Split a job between enough people and each share is too small to feel. The harm happens anyway, in full and on time. Everyone worked properly. Everyone was tired. Everyone assumed the guilt would settle on whoever came next. It settles on no one — but something stays with whoever stood closest when the door shut.
These books put you in that chair, and you will be comfortable there. Which is the point. Notice how little cruelty it takes.
Start anywhere: each book opens with enough of a recap to stand on its own.
Start the Series Here
All 7 Books in the Series
······
The Unheard House
The House is what the people inside called the place, because nobody outside would give it a name they could say aloud. Unheard is the other half of it: a woman speaks eleven minutes into a camera in a dialect no one on the crew can follow, and the film goes out for thirty-four years with her words subtitled as a prayer she is not saying. It is a walled colony outside Tabriz
where the illness takes the nerve, and nobody inside can be
trusted to feel what is happening to them. Three novellas —
a cutting room thirty-four years late, the wall itself in 1938,
and a company in Rotterdam that has worked out what the place
was for — about what two hundred people gave their hands
and their eyes to protect.
تقدیم به فروغ فرخزاد، ۱۳۱۳–۱۳۴۵رفت آنجا که رفتن گناه بود، گفت آنچه که گفتن گناه بود.
Start the Series Here
All 3 Books in the Series
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Author's Notes
Some thoughts can't be said out loud without
changing how the room sees you afterward. So they don't get
said.
Not shameful thoughts. The partly true ones.
Everyone keeps one, unsaid, for years—and unsaid is what
keeps it alive. Sooner or later it wants a body that isn't
yours. I give it one.
The mind negotiates. Given a minute alone it
will reframe anything, delay anything, forgive itself in
advance. The body won't. It keeps the actual record,
underneath the words, where no conversation reaches—which
is why nothing here gets settled by one. An ordeal is the
only interrogation that works on a witness who doesn't
talk.
Nothing here resolves. I'm suspicious of anyone
whose does.
Call it noir, transgressive, plausible—most
of these are all three. Something bad happens to someone
who's earned about half of it, and nobody gets saved. I
don't cut away from the ugly part. And it's plausible:
everything in these books could actually happen. I let
myself bend one thing about the world per book—never
two—and everything else stays exactly as ordinary as it
already is.
Bring your ugliest thought. There's a chair
for it.
