A Story That Is Finished Before It Begins

Introducing Atefe Asadi’s “A Coffin for Four”

Citizen Raja, “Women. Life. Freedom.” (2022)

Last year, I was thrilled to discover “A Coffin for Four,” a short story by the Iranian writer Atefe Asadi (b. 1994, Tehran), who currently resides in Germany. The story is perhaps the best work of fiction I have ever read that deals with the Women, Life, Freedom uprising that mobilized women and men during 2022 throughout Iran to fight for their collective freedom.

The struggle continues, although the forms of resistance have changed. In 2025, we can think of Women, Life, Freedom as more of a movement that is changing how women and men engage with the Iranian state rather than as an uprising, which was a singular event that began on 16 September 2022 with the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini and ended with over five hundred deaths.

However we relate to the legacy of this uprising, “A Coffin for Four” tells us a great deal about what it is like to come of age in contemporary Iran. Indeed, the story tells us what it is like to participate in — and to be brutalized by — an authoritarian state anywhere in the world.

Featuring multiple protagonists, the story enters into the lives of the persecutors as well as the persecuted. Asadi says a great deal in few words. “A Coffin for Four” is remarkable in its ability to immerse us in the…