author Goli Taraghi believes that everyday objects have a lived history behind them that goes back to “primordial time.” The recent collection The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons (W.W. Norton & Co.) translates many of her short stories of the past forty years into English for the first time. Taraghi tells how she learned to convert experience into fable, and explains her stories’ conscious subtlety in charting the entry of the eternal into the daily world. The daughter of a publishing magnate who was also a member of the Parliament, Taraghi grew up in a Westernized family in Tehran, though she spent much of her childhood in the company of her devoutly Islamic extended family. Educated at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1960s, Taraghi returned to pursue graduate studies at Tehran University, where she eventually became a professor of philosophy.
