Afghanistan
To read about the title selected for this country, you will need to obtain a print copy of Issue 01 of Found in Translation. Copies are $6 via Venmo to @rosseroo - use the memo feature in Venmo to send me your US address and I’ll get one out to you ASAP. Message me on Substack for pricing outside the United States.
Fiction in English by an Afghan author is a rather shallow pool of limited options. There is, of course, Khaled Hosseini, whose book The Kite Runner, was a blockbuster bestseller and appears on pretty much any list of books to read about Afghanistan. For that reason, I haven’t read it, but I did read his other two books, and they are pretty good. However, by the self-imposed rules I’ve made for this project, he doesn’t qualify because his family immigrated to California when he was 15, plussing as which (to borrow one of my favorite phrases, by the excellent Mark Jude Poirier) he lived in Iran and France for almost half of his childhood and only spent about eight years in Afghanistan.
On the other end of the literary fame spectrum are a whole slew of folks who’ve self-published books that may or not be good, but I’m not inclined for this project to track down. These include:
BA Zikria’s The Afghan Prince and I
Hatef Mokhtar’s The Red Wrath
Laila Anwarzai Ayoubi’s Niki’s Honor
Wali Shaaker’s The River Village
Also somewhere in the murky grey of self-publishing territory is Asef Soltanzadeh’s collection of short stories Disappearing Into Flight. Riddled with typographical errors and clunky formatting, the eight stories are Kabul-centric and generally kind of flat so I wouldn’t recommend tracking it down unless you have a significant interest in Kabul.
Finally, there’s Atiq Rahimi, who grew up in Kabul and then fled Afghanistan in his late teens in the wake of the Soviets invasion. He lived in Paris for seventeen years before returning to Afghanistan in 2002. He’s written four books that are available in English:
The Patience Stone — I ruled this out because it also pops up a lot on lists of Afghan fiction, and even won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt (and also I didn’t really love it).
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear — I read this one and really didn’t care for the stylized writing at all.
A Curse on Dostoevsky — I’ve never read Crime and Punishment (I know, I know…) and so maybe this would have been more interesting if I had, since it’s certainly “in conversation” with that classic if not a direct retelling. It’s set just after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and has something to say about a community tearing itself apart, but I ultimately found it kind of frustrating.
Earth and Ashes — This is what I selected, read about it in Issue 01. You can also usually find the film adaptation on YouTube.
Note that The Patience Stone, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, and Earth and Ashes are only available individually as ebooks, but are all collected in print in Three by Atiq Rahimi.
If you have some other suggestions for books by Afghan writers, drop ‘em in the comments along with any questions or reactions.