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The Potato Eaters: Stories
From Kurdish poet and writer Farhad Pirbal, a heartbreaking collection of short stories.
Each tale in The Potato Eaters underlines “otherness”, or isolation and displacement in contemporary society. His characters are at once resonant and shocking, his ability to decry trauma reminiscent of American greats like Morrison and Hurston.
The title story from this collection is one of the most acclaimed Kurdish short stories; it features a town that, due to famine, only survives on potatoes. The community comes to appreciate the base cuisine and abandon currency for their coveted starch. When the story’s protagonist returns from his travels, he brings gold home and he is met with utter apathy; he is a stranger in his own country.
“Lamartine” tells the story of a struggling poetry expert with a PhD on Lamartine’s lines in search of a lucrative career. He has trouble finding the right words to get a job. He visits a local career agency and in plain verse, asks for a career; he and the agent imagine a world wherein poets are paid by the line instead of the hour, a world in which artists always have a steady income. After the encounter, he says to a statue of his hero, “we really do live pitifully, us all like us, artists and poets. Often I have thought that a demon, at the beginning of time, must have nursed misfortune our first milk.”
“The Deserter” spotlights a forgetful soldier struggling to find his lost leg in 1989. He hobbles for nearly ten days until his Corporal informs him to prepare for war. “How?”, he wonders. The two go in search for a new leg, scavenging through piles of human body parts. In war, all warriors lose pieces of legs, arms, minds, hearts and souls. He reflects on his “My generation and I…we are the sacrifice of our era; the sacrifice to war and the dirty battles of those fools and frauds we call today’s leaders.” The story ends there—without resolution. This finality parallels the ramifications of stories and lives cut short, questions left unanswered.
Each tale in The Potato Eaters underlines “otherness”, or isolation and displacement in contemporary society. His characters are at once resonant and shocking, his ability to decry trauma reminiscent of American greats like Morrison and Hurston.
The title story from this collection is one of the most acclaimed Kurdish short stories; it features a town that, due to famine, only survives on potatoes. The community comes to appreciate the base cuisine and abandon currency for their coveted starch. When the story’s protagonist returns from his travels, he brings gold home and he is met with utter apathy; he is a stranger in his own country.
“Lamartine” tells the story of a struggling poetry expert with a PhD on Lamartine’s lines in search of a lucrative career. He has trouble finding the right words to get a job. He visits a local career agency and in plain verse, asks for a career; he and the agent imagine a world wherein poets are paid by the line instead of the hour, a world in which artists always have a steady income. After the encounter, he says to a statue of his hero, “we really do live pitifully, us all like us, artists and poets. Often I have thought that a demon, at the beginning of time, must have nursed misfortune our first milk.”
“The Deserter” spotlights a forgetful soldier struggling to find his lost leg in 1989. He hobbles for nearly ten days until his Corporal informs him to prepare for war. “How?”, he wonders. The two go in search for a new leg, scavenging through piles of human body parts. In war, all warriors lose pieces of legs, arms, minds, hearts and souls. He reflects on his “My generation and I…we are the sacrifice of our era; the sacrifice to war and the dirty battles of those fools and frauds we call today’s leaders.” The story ends there—without resolution. This finality parallels the ramifications of stories and lives cut short, questions left unanswered.
- GenresShort Stories
179 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 9, 2024
About the author
Farhad Pirbal
21 books169 followersFarhad Pirbal (Sorani Kurdish: فەرھاد پیرباڵ; born 1961)[2] is a Kurdish writer, philosopher, singer, poet, painter and critic. He was born in the city of Erbil (Hawler) in Southern Kurdistan. He studied Kurdish language and literature in the University of Salahadin in Hewlêr. In 1986, he left Kurdistan to France.[3] He continued his studies in University of Sorbonne in the field of Kurdish literature. After going back to Southern Kurdistan, in 1994, he established the Sharafkhan Badlisi cultural center.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 30, 2024
Pirbal is the epitome of the Kurdish identity, an absurd, nonsensical existence that does not conform to its surroundings' expectations of it. You deny the Kurds their own box, soon enough they start condemning boxes all together—Pirbal goes as far as to leave the plane of geometry entirely... There's no way to describe the man coherently, he is incoherence embodied. If He Must Be Described: Public presentation wise he’s a Zižek, except he doesn’t have Tourette’s and is most certainly on drugs. Work wise there’s a strong Dadaist edge to his work but that, again, does not sum his style up with justice. Pirbal came back from Sorbonne with years devoted to the arts, years working through the greatest Kurdish poets as well as those of the West, all to be called a lunatic, imprisoned, committed to a psych ward, imprisoned again for arson, published just under a hundred pieces, impri—he’s really the full package.
For as much as Pirbal seems to struggle with the world he's in, I can't help but feel it's the world that's somehow fallen short of him.
Back to Actual Thoughts that (should) comprise a review:
I was initially quite hesitant about how this translation would turn out but I think (for the most part) it captures Pirbal's intent—it is far less literal than I expected, thankfully. That said, I was still compelled to grieve once reading Hajj Qadri Koye’s poem in English—which is devoid of almost all meaning. I wonder how much else l've lost in translation (cont. will Duolingo Russian ever be enough?)
The butchered poem:
If you leave, every return is as if
You’ve left home to arrive in Jabulqa*
Read this if you can. Learn the language if you can. Read the original if you can. (Purchase hashish and recite Lamaratine until he is conjured at the foot of your bed if you can, or don’t).
All fun and playful absurdities aside, reading Pirbal, knowing Pirbal, and witnessing Pirbal’s public persona are such extremely different experiences you get whiplash just trying to switch from thinking about one to the other. He has lost all will to convince the minority that speak his language and share his history that his work is of importance and that he is sane—it is almost admirable the bit he has committed to. He is still a prolific writer and the quality of his last pieces of work have only gotten better despite his theatric, batshit public persona having only gotten worse. 5/5
For as much as Pirbal seems to struggle with the world he's in, I can't help but feel it's the world that's somehow fallen short of him.
Back to Actual Thoughts that (should) comprise a review:
I was initially quite hesitant about how this translation would turn out but I think (for the most part) it captures Pirbal's intent—it is far less literal than I expected, thankfully. That said, I was still compelled to grieve once reading Hajj Qadri Koye’s poem in English—which is devoid of almost all meaning. I wonder how much else l've lost in translation (cont. will Duolingo Russian ever be enough?)
The butchered poem:
If you leave, every return is as if
You’ve left home to arrive in Jabulqa*
Read this if you can. Learn the language if you can. Read the original if you can. (Purchase hashish and recite Lamaratine until he is conjured at the foot of your bed if you can, or don’t).
All fun and playful absurdities aside, reading Pirbal, knowing Pirbal, and witnessing Pirbal’s public persona are such extremely different experiences you get whiplash just trying to switch from thinking about one to the other. He has lost all will to convince the minority that speak his language and share his history that his work is of importance and that he is sane—it is almost admirable the bit he has committed to. He is still a prolific writer and the quality of his last pieces of work have only gotten better despite his theatric, batshit public persona having only gotten worse. 5/5
February 1, 2026
These stories are translated from Kurdish and set in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Loneliness, dejection, abuse, and family trauma run through this book like streams of sorrow and hurt. The writing is sometimes inventive in form which works as there is always a point to the convention breaking. The writing is also nervous and passionate; desperate. This book affected me and made me remember too much of my twenties and the sorrows that filled up those years.
Thank you to the employee at the Deep Vellum book store in Dallas for this recommendation.
Loneliness, dejection, abuse, and family trauma run through this book like streams of sorrow and hurt. The writing is sometimes inventive in form which works as there is always a point to the convention breaking. The writing is also nervous and passionate; desperate. This book affected me and made me remember too much of my twenties and the sorrows that filled up those years.
Thank you to the employee at the Deep Vellum book store in Dallas for this recommendation.
July 19, 2026
Farhad Pirbal writes from a specific historical position, a Kurdish writer educated at Salahadin and the Sorbonne, moving between Hawler, Paris, and Scandinavian exile through the exact decades (roughly 1979-1999, per the dateline each story carries like a field report) when the Kurdish experience of Iraq meant the Iran-Iraq War, Anfal and chemical warfare, the 1991 uprising, and mass displacement. What's striking across all fifteen stories is that almost none of this history is narrated directly, it's the pressure the absurdism and the formal experimentation are pushing against. Below is each story on its own terms.
The Margins of Europe: A lonely Kurdish refugee, Kurdo, rides a train across Denmark chasing a photo from a lonely-hearts ad; his conversation with an old woman about Danish/European solitude turns out, in the final lines, to be a conversation with the very woman in the ad, who used a photo of her youth to lure him. The dialogue on Kierkegaard and loneliness sometimes reads more like inserted essay than naturalistic speech, but the twist retroactively reframes the whole story as something sadder and stranger, not a young refugee's romantic misadventure but an old woman's own desperate authorship of company. The footnote apparatus, which runs a parallel, sometimes contradicting commentary beneath the main text, is the story's cleverest device: exile literature as a text that needs its own gloss.
The Deserter: A soldier realizes he's left his leg at the base; the ensuing search through an armory of loose body parts plays as pure bureaucratic deadpan (echoes of Gogol's "The Nose" are hard to avoid) until the leg itself writes a letter urging desertion to Europe. The narrator's refusal, he's too exhausted even to flee, is the real punch: desertion, selfhood, and the body all come apart together. It's the shortest of the war stories and the most efficient; the closing line about being "the sacrifice of our time" earns its pathos because everything preceding it was so flatly comic.
Lamartine: An unemployed Kurdish poet with a Sorbonne doctorate on Lamartine's rhyme schemes is told, at the unemployment office, that poems can be sold for a fee-and-deposit like commodities. He later finds the statue of Lamartine come to life beside its plinth, working nights as a hotel security guard, equally a stranger in Paris. This is the funniest story in the book and among the tightest: the devaluation of literary capital in exile, rendered through one clean magical-realist conceit, without needing the essayistic padding that slows "Margins of Europe"
A Refugee: A refugee orders ten bananas and eats them one by one; the exact repeated clause, eating each banana, throwing each peel on the sidewalk, is repeated, nearly verbatim, by the waiter, the café owner, the police, a witness, and finally the national press. This is closer to Ionesco than to conventional narrative; the repetition is punishing by design, and that's the argument: a banal, private act becomes an object of escalating institutional and media obsession, each retelling adding weight without adding fact. Whether it "works" depends on your tolerance for the discomfort, but the cumulative effect, surveillance and spectacle built from nothing, is genuinely unsettling.
An Epic Tragedy: Eight words: "a man… a woman… each their own loneliness…" The title's grandiosity against the content's near-nothing is the whole joke and the whole point, modern tragedy isn't heroic, it's this small. It functions less as a story than as a hinge or breath between the longer pieces around it.
The Potato Eaters: The title story, and I'd call it the collection's most fully achieved piece. Fereydun returns home after thirteen years abroad, bearing gold, to a village that, under an unnamed "plague" clearly standing in for prolonged war and embargo-era deprivation (Iraqi Kurdistan's real 1990s reliance on potato subsistence gives this real historical ballast), has reorganized its entire economy, cuisine, and even funeral rites around the potato. The family's mounting, repeated demand ("why didn't you bring potatoes?") is the same repetition-as-structure device as "A Refugee," but redeployed for tragedy instead of satire, and it lands harder: gold and potatoes are simply incommensurable currencies, and the closing image, only his dead mother, in her grave, still understood what gold was, is devastating without a wasted word. The epigraph from Haji Qadir Koye, invoking Jabulqa (the mythical, unreachable city of Islamic cosmology), sets up the whole story's argument before it starts: return, after this kind of absence, is arrival somewhere that only resembles home.
Schizophrenia: Formally the most radical story in the book: it's built as fifteen numbered boxes, each ending in cross-references ("see box No. 5," "see box No. 11"), assembling, non-linearly, Cortázar's Hopscotch is the obvious kin, though Borges's forking-path logic is just as present, the fragmented case of Bakhtiyar, a Kurdish refugee in France whose breakdown (sleepwalking, shattering shop windows, a diagnosis an interpreter mistranslates as "the loony bin") can only be reconstructed by jumping around. Some of the cross-references aren't arbitrary: box 13's "Eastern" and "European" readings of a hybrid, code-switched poem fragment route to the same two boxes as his Kurdish mother's care and a French nurse's care, quietly equating the two as parallel, incomplete tendernesses. This is the piece I'd point to if you wanted to see the collection's technique working at full capacity, the fragmentation isn't decoration, it's the diagnosis enacted as form.
The Lion: On a remote Danish refugee island, Sherzad ("lion-born" in Kurdish) recalls a childhood memory of an actual wounded lion, tethered and bleeding, that once collapsed in his family's courtyard, pitied, fed, but never released from its rope. The doubling (his name, his condition, the animal) does all the symbolic work without a line of explanation, and the story's refusal to resolve, it ends mid-gesture, before we know whether he accepts the food set in front of him, is its real discipline. Unsurprisingly this is the one story from the book that had already found outside recognition (it's noted in the acknowledgments as anthologized separately); it's the most compressed and least over-explained thing here.
The Killing of a Turkish Soldier in Zakho: Told entirely as short, contradicting courtroom testimonies, the husband, an unnamed witness, "the accused," a Turkish soldier, Rashomon-style, over an incident of harassment (a soldier gropes a Kurdish woman on a bridge near a statue of the national poet Ahmad Khani) that escalates into a killing whose actual agent stays permanently undecidable. There's no authorial voice at all, and it ends unresolved, on a repeated rhetorical question. This is the most politically direct piece in the book precisely because of its restraint: the impossibility of adjudicating violence between occupier and occupied, staged as an impossibility of narrative itself.
The Desert: A child narrator, staying with an Arab friend's family in a desert exile settlement, is detained overnight at a checkpoint after a soccer play-sketch is misread as an espionage map, terrified his own family will be "displaced again" before he's released. The gutting final turn, he discovers the "commander" he's been told to wait for has been a corpse the entire time, and is re-arrested at the exact moment his family's transport truck disappears, is the most Kafkaesque passage in the collection, more so than any of the overtly comic pieces that invite the comparison more obviously.
The Brand on the Back of My Hand: A feverish, run-on confessional monologue (the closest the book comes to the Bukowski register the introduction invokes) about a lifelong, unexplained scar, product of a violent, gambling, brothel-keeping father, resolved, after pages of mounting dread, into an almost farcical anticlimax (the boy, desperate, urinates into an arak bottle his drunk father later tries to drink from). This is the story I'd flag as most uneven: the "why, why, why" incantation risks exhausting the reader before the reveal arrives, and the reveal itself is a real gamble, it can read as a masterstroke (trauma's real disproportion: suffering rarely has a cause worthy of its damage) or as a moment that trivializes the abuse just spent several pages establishing. I lean toward the former reading, since it's consistent with the book's larger method of wrapping real horror in absurd literalism, but it's worth sitting with rather than a clean success.
A New Address: Sustained second person, genuinely hard to do, and the introduction is right to single it out, following a young man just expelled from his book-burning father's house into a cheap hotel room, where the story doubles as a portrait of the writer's vocation: the impossible task of writing "the stories of millions of starving, displaced people." The address collapses the distance between "you" and reader in a way that feels earned rather than gimmicky, because the content (a father who burns every book you own) makes the act of address itself a form of resistance.
Zaynab and More: Also second person, addressed to a woman, implied sex worker, supporting two younger sisters after their parents' deaths, on the night she's decided to end her life, stayed at the last moment by the sight of her sleeping younger brother. It's the story I'd flag as most ethically complex to evaluate: it's a serious, largely non-exploitative attempt to inhabit a woman's interiority directly rather than filtering her through a man's longing, as almost every other woman in this collection is filtered, and the specifics (the sisters' resentment, the calculus of her economic role, the hypocrisy of the suitor's family) give her real complexity rather than pure symbol. Whether the ending, rescued by sisterly/maternal instinct rather than by anything she herself reasons through, fully earns its resolution, or slightly softens a crisis the story has otherwise treated unsparingly, is a fair question to leave open.
The Wild Windflowers of Kotal: A former peshmerga fighter, having survived chemical attacks and lost his family, returns after years to his university sweetheart's house, rehearsing an imagined joyful reunion, only to have the door answered by a mute, deranged old woman who drives him off with wordless shrieking. The long, patient buildup of imagined dialogue is what makes the rupture at the door land as horror rather than melodrama: we've been too far inside his hope. Leaving Shadan's actual fate to pure implication, rather than spelling out Halabja or Anfal by name, is the story's most disciplined choice, it trusts the reader with the history.
A Woman: The closing story, and no woman appears in it at all, a lonely expatriate narrator waits nightly at a bar for a friend who finally returns, devastated and unrecognizable, without explanation. The title's non-delivery is of a piece with "An Epic Tragedy"'s eight words: Pirbal likes titles that promise something the story withholds. As a closer it's slighter than the collection's best work, but the refusal to resolve either the friend's fate or the title's promise is a fitting, deliberately anticlimactic way to end.
On the collection as a whole: The toolkit repeats productively across these fifteen pieces, literalized metaphor (the leg, the lion, the statue, the potato economy), repetition pushed past comfort, multiplied or contradictory testimony, embedded paratext (footnotes, cross-referenced boxes), sustained second person, and titles that don't pay out. It's genuinely impressive how much of this feels structurally necessary rather than merely stylish, "Schizophrenia" and "The Killing of a Turkish Soldier in Zakho" especially couldn't be told any other way and say what they say. Where the collection is more uniform than its formal daring might suggest is in the interior-monologue register shared by "A New Address," "Zaynab and More," and "The Brand on the Back of My Hand", the same incantatory "agh," the same rhetorical question-piling, which reads as powerful in any single story and slightly homogeneous across three read consecutively. And it's worth naming plainly that women in this book are, with the partial exception of Zaynab, almost always routed through a man's memory, longing, or gaze rather than granted independent narrative center, the old woman as a mystery to be solved, Shadan as a bouquet of memories, the title character of the final story who never even appears. None of that erases what the strongest pieces here do, "The Potato Eaters," "Schizophrenia," and "The Desert" in particular earn every comparison to Kafka, Cortázar, and Borges that the introduction reaches for, but it's the honest limit of an otherwise formally fearless book.
The Margins of Europe: A lonely Kurdish refugee, Kurdo, rides a train across Denmark chasing a photo from a lonely-hearts ad; his conversation with an old woman about Danish/European solitude turns out, in the final lines, to be a conversation with the very woman in the ad, who used a photo of her youth to lure him. The dialogue on Kierkegaard and loneliness sometimes reads more like inserted essay than naturalistic speech, but the twist retroactively reframes the whole story as something sadder and stranger, not a young refugee's romantic misadventure but an old woman's own desperate authorship of company. The footnote apparatus, which runs a parallel, sometimes contradicting commentary beneath the main text, is the story's cleverest device: exile literature as a text that needs its own gloss.
The Deserter: A soldier realizes he's left his leg at the base; the ensuing search through an armory of loose body parts plays as pure bureaucratic deadpan (echoes of Gogol's "The Nose" are hard to avoid) until the leg itself writes a letter urging desertion to Europe. The narrator's refusal, he's too exhausted even to flee, is the real punch: desertion, selfhood, and the body all come apart together. It's the shortest of the war stories and the most efficient; the closing line about being "the sacrifice of our time" earns its pathos because everything preceding it was so flatly comic.
Lamartine: An unemployed Kurdish poet with a Sorbonne doctorate on Lamartine's rhyme schemes is told, at the unemployment office, that poems can be sold for a fee-and-deposit like commodities. He later finds the statue of Lamartine come to life beside its plinth, working nights as a hotel security guard, equally a stranger in Paris. This is the funniest story in the book and among the tightest: the devaluation of literary capital in exile, rendered through one clean magical-realist conceit, without needing the essayistic padding that slows "Margins of Europe"
A Refugee: A refugee orders ten bananas and eats them one by one; the exact repeated clause, eating each banana, throwing each peel on the sidewalk, is repeated, nearly verbatim, by the waiter, the café owner, the police, a witness, and finally the national press. This is closer to Ionesco than to conventional narrative; the repetition is punishing by design, and that's the argument: a banal, private act becomes an object of escalating institutional and media obsession, each retelling adding weight without adding fact. Whether it "works" depends on your tolerance for the discomfort, but the cumulative effect, surveillance and spectacle built from nothing, is genuinely unsettling.
An Epic Tragedy: Eight words: "a man… a woman… each their own loneliness…" The title's grandiosity against the content's near-nothing is the whole joke and the whole point, modern tragedy isn't heroic, it's this small. It functions less as a story than as a hinge or breath between the longer pieces around it.
The Potato Eaters: The title story, and I'd call it the collection's most fully achieved piece. Fereydun returns home after thirteen years abroad, bearing gold, to a village that, under an unnamed "plague" clearly standing in for prolonged war and embargo-era deprivation (Iraqi Kurdistan's real 1990s reliance on potato subsistence gives this real historical ballast), has reorganized its entire economy, cuisine, and even funeral rites around the potato. The family's mounting, repeated demand ("why didn't you bring potatoes?") is the same repetition-as-structure device as "A Refugee," but redeployed for tragedy instead of satire, and it lands harder: gold and potatoes are simply incommensurable currencies, and the closing image, only his dead mother, in her grave, still understood what gold was, is devastating without a wasted word. The epigraph from Haji Qadir Koye, invoking Jabulqa (the mythical, unreachable city of Islamic cosmology), sets up the whole story's argument before it starts: return, after this kind of absence, is arrival somewhere that only resembles home.
Schizophrenia: Formally the most radical story in the book: it's built as fifteen numbered boxes, each ending in cross-references ("see box No. 5," "see box No. 11"), assembling, non-linearly, Cortázar's Hopscotch is the obvious kin, though Borges's forking-path logic is just as present, the fragmented case of Bakhtiyar, a Kurdish refugee in France whose breakdown (sleepwalking, shattering shop windows, a diagnosis an interpreter mistranslates as "the loony bin") can only be reconstructed by jumping around. Some of the cross-references aren't arbitrary: box 13's "Eastern" and "European" readings of a hybrid, code-switched poem fragment route to the same two boxes as his Kurdish mother's care and a French nurse's care, quietly equating the two as parallel, incomplete tendernesses. This is the piece I'd point to if you wanted to see the collection's technique working at full capacity, the fragmentation isn't decoration, it's the diagnosis enacted as form.
The Lion: On a remote Danish refugee island, Sherzad ("lion-born" in Kurdish) recalls a childhood memory of an actual wounded lion, tethered and bleeding, that once collapsed in his family's courtyard, pitied, fed, but never released from its rope. The doubling (his name, his condition, the animal) does all the symbolic work without a line of explanation, and the story's refusal to resolve, it ends mid-gesture, before we know whether he accepts the food set in front of him, is its real discipline. Unsurprisingly this is the one story from the book that had already found outside recognition (it's noted in the acknowledgments as anthologized separately); it's the most compressed and least over-explained thing here.
The Killing of a Turkish Soldier in Zakho: Told entirely as short, contradicting courtroom testimonies, the husband, an unnamed witness, "the accused," a Turkish soldier, Rashomon-style, over an incident of harassment (a soldier gropes a Kurdish woman on a bridge near a statue of the national poet Ahmad Khani) that escalates into a killing whose actual agent stays permanently undecidable. There's no authorial voice at all, and it ends unresolved, on a repeated rhetorical question. This is the most politically direct piece in the book precisely because of its restraint: the impossibility of adjudicating violence between occupier and occupied, staged as an impossibility of narrative itself.
The Desert: A child narrator, staying with an Arab friend's family in a desert exile settlement, is detained overnight at a checkpoint after a soccer play-sketch is misread as an espionage map, terrified his own family will be "displaced again" before he's released. The gutting final turn, he discovers the "commander" he's been told to wait for has been a corpse the entire time, and is re-arrested at the exact moment his family's transport truck disappears, is the most Kafkaesque passage in the collection, more so than any of the overtly comic pieces that invite the comparison more obviously.
The Brand on the Back of My Hand: A feverish, run-on confessional monologue (the closest the book comes to the Bukowski register the introduction invokes) about a lifelong, unexplained scar, product of a violent, gambling, brothel-keeping father, resolved, after pages of mounting dread, into an almost farcical anticlimax (the boy, desperate, urinates into an arak bottle his drunk father later tries to drink from). This is the story I'd flag as most uneven: the "why, why, why" incantation risks exhausting the reader before the reveal arrives, and the reveal itself is a real gamble, it can read as a masterstroke (trauma's real disproportion: suffering rarely has a cause worthy of its damage) or as a moment that trivializes the abuse just spent several pages establishing. I lean toward the former reading, since it's consistent with the book's larger method of wrapping real horror in absurd literalism, but it's worth sitting with rather than a clean success.
A New Address: Sustained second person, genuinely hard to do, and the introduction is right to single it out, following a young man just expelled from his book-burning father's house into a cheap hotel room, where the story doubles as a portrait of the writer's vocation: the impossible task of writing "the stories of millions of starving, displaced people." The address collapses the distance between "you" and reader in a way that feels earned rather than gimmicky, because the content (a father who burns every book you own) makes the act of address itself a form of resistance.
Zaynab and More: Also second person, addressed to a woman, implied sex worker, supporting two younger sisters after their parents' deaths, on the night she's decided to end her life, stayed at the last moment by the sight of her sleeping younger brother. It's the story I'd flag as most ethically complex to evaluate: it's a serious, largely non-exploitative attempt to inhabit a woman's interiority directly rather than filtering her through a man's longing, as almost every other woman in this collection is filtered, and the specifics (the sisters' resentment, the calculus of her economic role, the hypocrisy of the suitor's family) give her real complexity rather than pure symbol. Whether the ending, rescued by sisterly/maternal instinct rather than by anything she herself reasons through, fully earns its resolution, or slightly softens a crisis the story has otherwise treated unsparingly, is a fair question to leave open.
The Wild Windflowers of Kotal: A former peshmerga fighter, having survived chemical attacks and lost his family, returns after years to his university sweetheart's house, rehearsing an imagined joyful reunion, only to have the door answered by a mute, deranged old woman who drives him off with wordless shrieking. The long, patient buildup of imagined dialogue is what makes the rupture at the door land as horror rather than melodrama: we've been too far inside his hope. Leaving Shadan's actual fate to pure implication, rather than spelling out Halabja or Anfal by name, is the story's most disciplined choice, it trusts the reader with the history.
A Woman: The closing story, and no woman appears in it at all, a lonely expatriate narrator waits nightly at a bar for a friend who finally returns, devastated and unrecognizable, without explanation. The title's non-delivery is of a piece with "An Epic Tragedy"'s eight words: Pirbal likes titles that promise something the story withholds. As a closer it's slighter than the collection's best work, but the refusal to resolve either the friend's fate or the title's promise is a fitting, deliberately anticlimactic way to end.
On the collection as a whole: The toolkit repeats productively across these fifteen pieces, literalized metaphor (the leg, the lion, the statue, the potato economy), repetition pushed past comfort, multiplied or contradictory testimony, embedded paratext (footnotes, cross-referenced boxes), sustained second person, and titles that don't pay out. It's genuinely impressive how much of this feels structurally necessary rather than merely stylish, "Schizophrenia" and "The Killing of a Turkish Soldier in Zakho" especially couldn't be told any other way and say what they say. Where the collection is more uniform than its formal daring might suggest is in the interior-monologue register shared by "A New Address," "Zaynab and More," and "The Brand on the Back of My Hand", the same incantatory "agh," the same rhetorical question-piling, which reads as powerful in any single story and slightly homogeneous across three read consecutively. And it's worth naming plainly that women in this book are, with the partial exception of Zaynab, almost always routed through a man's memory, longing, or gaze rather than granted independent narrative center, the old woman as a mystery to be solved, Shadan as a bouquet of memories, the title character of the final story who never even appears. None of that erases what the strongest pieces here do, "The Potato Eaters," "Schizophrenia," and "The Desert" in particular earn every comparison to Kafka, Cortázar, and Borges that the introduction reaches for, but it's the honest limit of an otherwise formally fearless book.
December 13, 2024
A poignant novel that delves into the struggles of a Kurdish family grappling with poverty and societal challenges. Pirbal's storytelling is both raw and evocative, capturing the harsh realities of life while infusing it with moments of resilience and hope. The characters are richly and beautifully developed, making their struggles almost relatable, and moving. Loved this so much
August 27, 2025
3.75 ✨’s
enjoyed the beginning stories more than the ones that came at the end but overall really liked it
there’s a lot of dark humor here but if that’s your thing check it out
enjoyed the beginning stories more than the ones that came at the end but overall really liked it
there’s a lot of dark humor here but if that’s your thing check it out
March 10, 2026
That was so fun. Great work from the English translators.
If you're familiar with Pirbals eccentric personality and haven't checked out any of his work yet, this seems like a great place to start.
If you're familiar with Pirbals eccentric personality and haven't checked out any of his work yet, this seems like a great place to start.
August 21, 2024
Farhad Pirbal weaves his stories with immaculate precision of unconventional narrative, beyond comprehension & expectations. His stories are dark, absurd, ridiculously clever with playful writing that elevates the reading experience to the next level. I was immersed by how fluid & engaging his stories were, with earlier stories are in the dark comedy realm with absurdism, interesting repetitive words scattered in some of the stories, the clever footnote in one, the interactive stories for you to read and make up your own completed story to the heartwrenching and emotional stories in the second half.
His themes revolved a lot on the isolation, solitude, loneliness and the immigrant's troublesome path in connecting with their new place while missing their home country. There were some very dark matter on abuse and violence but tangled up with a sprinkle of humor to lighten up. What a ride!
This is my first Kurdish literature and I was fascinated by this collection. I wished I can read in its original language to better appreciate the beauty of these proses. These were incredible translations in my humble opinion from a point of view of someone who just knew about Farhad Pirbal bcus now Im in dire need of more of his works to get translation.
Thank you to Edelweiss book and the publisher for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review
His themes revolved a lot on the isolation, solitude, loneliness and the immigrant's troublesome path in connecting with their new place while missing their home country. There were some very dark matter on abuse and violence but tangled up with a sprinkle of humor to lighten up. What a ride!
This is my first Kurdish literature and I was fascinated by this collection. I wished I can read in its original language to better appreciate the beauty of these proses. These were incredible translations in my humble opinion from a point of view of someone who just knew about Farhad Pirbal bcus now Im in dire need of more of his works to get translation.
Thank you to Edelweiss book and the publisher for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review
August 27, 2025
3.75 stars! [book club pick]
What a harrowing, but beautifully intimate collection of short stories. I think these collections of short stories paired so nicely together with other stories being rather human and others feeling a bit unconventional (in a good way!). I think Pirbal paints outside of the lines in this collection of short stories very well depicting the many ways in which people process loneliness, otherness, grief/loss, shame, etc.
What a harrowing, but beautifully intimate collection of short stories. I think these collections of short stories paired so nicely together with other stories being rather human and others feeling a bit unconventional (in a good way!). I think Pirbal paints outside of the lines in this collection of short stories very well depicting the many ways in which people process loneliness, otherness, grief/loss, shame, etc.
April 9, 2026
Such an interesting and innovative collection. Not only were the stories poignant and unique, but the style was simultaneously fitting and disconcerting. A very cool read!
April 4, 2026
Very fun read. Loved the title story, but that banana story was a riot.
April 7, 2025
a collection of stories of displacement and loneliness. probably the defining point of this collection, besides the Kurdish identity, is playing with structure. take the very first story, the margins of Europe, where footnotes are used as asides from the story, taking you one step out from the interaction before coming back in close. or perhaps A Refugee, where the same long, repetitive, copy-and-pasted actions draw out a simple scene, adding humor at first, perhaps, but also ratcheting up the absurdity and frustration of the event. there is a very brief almost-haiku, a choose your own adventure in Miniature, a courtroom report. but the stories that shine most (notwithstanding that introductory one) tend to be more human. the anxiety and paranoia of a man returning to see a lover after a long absence, the freedom of escaping to a place of your own, the lengths we will go to do what we feel will help our families. and of course the parable of the titular story. there's a lot of heart in here. I'd probably lean this toward a 3.5, but that's more a matter of my own connection than a commentary on quality
August 18, 2024
A really incredible collection of stories - I loved every single one! Farhad Pirbal plays with form quite a lot - one story uses footnotes in an incredible and playful way, one story is a chose your own adventure, one story uses repetition in a very funny way. A lot of the stories are funny (albeit dark) and then the stories in the second half of the book are absolutely heart wrenching - like rip your heart out vibes. I feel so lucky that this book was translated! This is the first work from Pirbal to be translated into English. The translators note at the end about translation in general but specifically co-translation was really illuminating. Definitely recommend picking up a copy of The Potato Eaters.
July 25, 2024
Beautifully written and thought provoking stories. Left me thinking about the characters. Overall grateful to have been able to read this author’s work.
January 9, 2025
This story collection from Kurdish writer and poet Pirbal is a phenomenal mix of dark themes of exile and dislocation rendered in playful and innovative formats and styles. Loved every bit of this, and I am grateful to translators Jiyar Homer and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and publisher Deep Vellum for bringing it to English language readers.
June 9, 2025
What an interesting book! Pirbal is a Kurdish writer, painter, poet, and philosopher. He has quite a fan base in Kurdistan, and I can see why after reading this book of short stories. Kurdistan is a geocultural region that is spread over multiple countries (Turkey, Armenia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran). Being a minority population in so many countries has inevitably left scars. This is reflected in these stories, which are dark albeit humorous and playful at times.
As might be expected from an artist who thinks outside the box, he crafted these stories in imaginative ways. There’s a story with footnotes that lead you on a second stream of thought. There’s another one (Schizophrenia) that is a make-it-your-own, where you decide what you want to read next. Then there’s the soldier who lost his leg … literally, and upon being told to report back to the Front, had to settle for someone else’s leg; the ending of this tale is wacky but also poignant. There are stories to break your heart, of course. Stories of despair and loneliness. Interestingly, he sometimes interchanges first and second person singular in the same paragraph, and the story suddenly feels autobiographical.
These stories have no resolutions, they’re essentially snapshots of life as immigrants and displaced people barely getting by. The title story is a case in point: A son returns home bearing gold after being away for years. During his absence, famine struck and now everyone is obsessed with potatoes. The gift of gold is incomprehensible to his family and community, and they are angry with him for not bringing back potatoes. Not fitting in, not belonging - this theme pops up over and over. And in the case of the gold-bearing son, even returning home proves to be a case of not fitting in anymore.
This book was translated from Kurdish to English. The two co-translators wrote a brief afterword describing their collaboration. There’s also an interesting foreword from a writer whose first memories were of the Iraq-Iran conflict. I will be rereading this book; the images and impressions were vivid and deserve revisiting.
As might be expected from an artist who thinks outside the box, he crafted these stories in imaginative ways. There’s a story with footnotes that lead you on a second stream of thought. There’s another one (Schizophrenia) that is a make-it-your-own, where you decide what you want to read next. Then there’s the soldier who lost his leg … literally, and upon being told to report back to the Front, had to settle for someone else’s leg; the ending of this tale is wacky but also poignant. There are stories to break your heart, of course. Stories of despair and loneliness. Interestingly, he sometimes interchanges first and second person singular in the same paragraph, and the story suddenly feels autobiographical.
These stories have no resolutions, they’re essentially snapshots of life as immigrants and displaced people barely getting by. The title story is a case in point: A son returns home bearing gold after being away for years. During his absence, famine struck and now everyone is obsessed with potatoes. The gift of gold is incomprehensible to his family and community, and they are angry with him for not bringing back potatoes. Not fitting in, not belonging - this theme pops up over and over. And in the case of the gold-bearing son, even returning home proves to be a case of not fitting in anymore.
This book was translated from Kurdish to English. The two co-translators wrote a brief afterword describing their collaboration. There’s also an interesting foreword from a writer whose first memories were of the Iraq-Iran conflict. I will be rereading this book; the images and impressions were vivid and deserve revisiting.
May 29, 2026
More from this region please.
There is a particular uncanniness to the storytelling from this region, a humorous tone to tragedies, an experimental approach unlike any other short story collections I have ever read. This collection features a wide range of styles, drawing outside the lines: a choose the next step story, a story with repetitive verse, stories that read like folk tales, stories that read like rambles, stories that are connected but possibly not, stories where the main character is not a main character. This was a blast to read.
My favourite is the title story: The Potato Eaters. The core themes in this collection (home, returning, leaving, being expelled, belonging) are so earnestly present in this story, the familiarity is breathtaking.
There is a particular uncanniness to the storytelling from this region, a humorous tone to tragedies, an experimental approach unlike any other short story collections I have ever read. This collection features a wide range of styles, drawing outside the lines: a choose the next step story, a story with repetitive verse, stories that read like folk tales, stories that read like rambles, stories that are connected but possibly not, stories where the main character is not a main character. This was a blast to read.
My favourite is the title story: The Potato Eaters. The core themes in this collection (home, returning, leaving, being expelled, belonging) are so earnestly present in this story, the familiarity is breathtaking.
February 17, 2025
3.5ish.
While any opportunity to read Kurdish literature is welcome, this collection is very limited in range and repetitive in theme, something the occasional playful jaunts into absurdism can't really hide. Interesting but not essential. It would be nice to read some Kurdish literature from non-celebrity writers (particularly women authors, as women get such short shrift in this particular book), but I'm not holding my breath.
While any opportunity to read Kurdish literature is welcome, this collection is very limited in range and repetitive in theme, something the occasional playful jaunts into absurdism can't really hide. Interesting but not essential. It would be nice to read some Kurdish literature from non-celebrity writers (particularly women authors, as women get such short shrift in this particular book), but I'm not holding my breath.
December 21, 2024
This is a very very good collection! The pain of immigration is uniquely felt for an ethnic group that is already getting displaced. Imaginative, fun, experimental short stories where form truly informs the content. 4 stars instead of 5 for the undertones of misogyny.
February 20, 2025
Such a good book. I chuckled, I cried, I thought a lot. Pirbal's way of writing is so poignant but could be so annoying at times that it really keeps you on your toes. Could and probably will re-read.
March 27, 2026
the first half is really really good a great sense of voice and imagination, experimentation done really well. second half bexomes more monotone still good writing but not the ahine from the firat half
3.5
3.5
Read
November 1, 2024Really enjoy some of these, especially the more surreal or formally experimental ones.
Women have a very limited role in the universe of these stories which is annoying.
Women have a very limited role in the universe of these stories which is annoying.
December 9, 2025
“ … how can you write something like that and settle your unsettled heart?”
very very good collection of short stories here, truly something special
very very good collection of short stories here, truly something special
December 13, 2025
3.5 ⭐️
March 21, 2026
my first read in kurdish and i don't regret it
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