Collection: The Edit by Pegah Farahmand

I don’t know of anything more powerful than literature. This thing that weighs hardly anything and fits in your pocket contains the power to expand and transform us. My mother was a librarian in Tehran and for as long as I can remember it was drilled into my head that nothing is more valuable than a library card. I have an eclectic selection here. I love classic literature thanks to my voracious reader of a brother who forced it on me when we were kids. I tried to move beyond the classics for this list, but I love the Russians. I love Shakespeare. I love Southern Gothic literature. Whenever I sit down to read, I stand up transformed in one way or another. And I’m always surprised by my own ignorance. 

Sufi poetry is the most grounding force in my life. Without it I would be a wreck. My mother sends me one poem a week via voice note, usually a passage from Rumi. Chekhov’s plays are like a crystal clear lake reflecting the landscape around it; a perfect mirror of ourselves. Yeats is the occult master. I still find much of his poetry slightly out of reach, but I allow myself to get lost in his mystical diction. Faulkner is the greatest modernist. His prose feels more contemporary to me than anything else today, and reading him is a painful, bodily, cathartic experience. I'm in love with Omar Sharif and his tortured eyes; I want to know anything and everything about his life. I have a weird obsession with Joyce Carol Oates’s essay on Mike Tyson. Lydia Davis’s dry sensibility cuts through my heart every time I read her stories. And finally The Pillow Book lights up my imagination; it was written in imperial Japan around the year 1000 by a fabulous young woman, Sei Shōnagon. Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film adaptation is also a favorite of mine.