Veils: Short Stories

These 10 stories by Rachlin ( Foreigner ) track unhappy Iranians who reside in their native country or live as expatriates in America. In ``Fanatics,'' Manijeh, who feels she has escaped from a dangerously sexist society to an American university where some students are restless and depressed, learns that her best friend in Teheran has died in a suicide attack on the Ministry of Education. In Iran, the protagonists of ``The Poet's Visit,'' two schoolgirls, become rivals for the attentions of a famous writer, and a girl in ``Rahbar'' wonders if her aunt's estranged husband is a murderer. The eponymous protagonist of ``Fatemeh'' tries to get her son exempted from the Iranian army, where he is likely to die a martyr's death, and searches for her daughter, who years before vanished with her abusive ex-husband. An American law student in ``Forces of Attraction'' is puzzled by the behavior of her new boyfriend, an Iranian doctor practicing in Manhattan, who is alternately attentive and remote and depressed. Although flatly executed and underdeveloped, the stories will interest some readers for the authentic glimpses they offer of a foreign, often closed society. (May)