A world waiting to be read

Somewhere between a mountain gate that’s held a death-god for three thousand years and a Tehran of drones and black-market elixirs, stories are being told in Persian.

They have men who trade their names the way other people trade coats, still running, after three thousand years, from a war they thought they’d already lost.

They imagine a future Tehran where love is manufactured, matched, and sold as a product, yet some people still pursue the likes of love corporations have never managed to license. They are willing to die for it if it comes to that.

And they have people washed back to life on a stone floor, in a blood rite older than the shrine built over it: a bloodline of vampires bound by tribal law, holding an uneasy truce with the hunters sworn to end them, a truce that has held for longer than anyone can remember.

They carry the scent of rosewater and saffron, the cadence of verses Ferdowsi wrote down a thousand years ago from an old man who never said where the stories really came from, and the particular ache of a diaspora that still argues over tea about how a myth should end.

We're opening the gate.

Locked behind language

If you read widely in science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the strange in-between genres that don’t have tidy names yet, you already know the feeling:

The shelves start to repeat themselves. The same imagined futures, monsters and mythologies, hand in hand, bringing about similar outcomes.

You’ve felt the opposite of that feeling before, too, just perhaps never with Persian on the other side of it. Japanese horror and speculative fiction crossed that boundary decades ago. Chinese science fiction has been translated and built a readership beyond its original language. African speculative fiction has been gaining traction internationally in recent years.

For most Persian-speaking writers, though, that path is still the exception. A fortunate few works find an experienced translator and a real audience, but far more sit unfinished, are self-published without editorial or distribution support, or simply never reach the readers who’d love them.

Rooted in centuries of myth, Persian speculative literature has been imagining other worlds for decades. Now it’s time to let the rest of the world read it.

We’re building the bridge.

One spectrum

We publish across the full range of speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, New Weird, and the genre-blurring work that refuses to sit still in one category. What anchors our catalog is simply extraordinary speculative writing from Persian-speaking authors, wherever in the world they happen to be.

That means two kinds of books live on our list side by side:

Translated from Persian: manuscripts and published titles originally written in Persian, brought into English for the first time.
Written in English: manuscripts authored by Persian-speaking authors, wherever they're based, who are already writing for a global audience.

Different origins. One shelf.

A New Calling

You may already know Metaphor Space as a not-for-profit platform. It’s a home for individual Persian-language short stories, either originally written in Persian or translated into Persian from other languages.

The publishing house grew out of that work, but serves a different purpose.

Metaphor Space Publishing House is a registered Canadian publishing business. The publishing house works in the other direction, bringing novels, anthologies, and short story collections of Persian-speaking authors into English.

One Root, Two Branches.

Not strangers knocking on the door

Metaphor Space Publishing House is the product of years of direct, ongoing involvement in Persian-language literary and speculative fiction circles. When we approach a writer, we're reaching someone whose work we already know, through relationships built over years in that community.

In practice, authors get a registered Canadian publisher with established distribution and legal standing to acquire and manage rights, carrying the work from manuscript to published book.

We're not outsiders here.

Now on the shelf

Our debut title has arrived:

Juliet Syndrome

by Zoha Kazemi

Translated from the Persian by Amir Sepahram

A detective noir set in a future Tehran where love is manufactured, marketed, and sold under contract.

A century and a half after the Year of Poison remade Tehran, love no longer feels real. It has become a product: engineered, matched, and delivered one hormone injection at a time.

A burned-out detective investigating a young woman's suicide uncovers a conspiracy that reaches all the way into the boardroom of the city's most powerful love corporation. He also uncovers an underground resistance built around the one thing the corporations haven't learned to sell: natural love.

Available now as an e-book and paperback, wherever you already buy books.

Book Description

The first of many.

Bring us your manuscript

If you’re a Persian-speaking writer who writes either in Persian or in English, and you write speculative fiction in any of its forms, we want to hear from you.

We work directly with authors to acquire rights, translate and edit their work, and bring it to readers through a Canadian publishing house. The people doing that work understand both the language and the culture behind the stories.

Contact us

Metaphor Space Publishing House

Vancouver, BC, Canada

+1 (604) 762-1955

publishinghouse.metaphorspace.com

publishinghouse@metaphorspace.com