This book investigates the ethical and aesthetic implications of modern Persian narratives. While the dominant traditions of Persian narrative studies reduce all that is in the text to the telos of meaning built on historical facts, this book analyzes narrative experimentation that engages in a critical negotiation with the excesses of the presentation of life. To locate the ethical at the intersection of the narrative and aesthetic, this book articulates an ethical account of a diverse range of narratives in modern Persian Literature in order to demonstrate alternative encounters with manifestations of life, such as pain, death, and trauma. Relevant to literary students and scholars in Near Eastern Studies, and in Persian literature and comparative literature in particular, the book highlights how narrative is a product of societal kinetics.