Publishing · 2026
H.R. Torkaman
Six books and six papers by one author, held together by a single visual rule and a site that refuses to explain itself.
Self-initiated project
Context
One name, two kinds of writing
H.R. Torkaman writes fiction and academic research, and had been publishing both without anything to hold them together. Five novels and story collections in English, one in Persian, and six research papers on the self, belief and attention — each arriving on its own, each looking like it came from somewhere else.
The work was to find the single position underneath all of it, then build the covers, the identity and the website from that one place rather than from twelve separate briefs.
Covers — English editions
Covers — The Answerable World, The Wanting Hour, and the Persian edition
The rule
One red thing per cover
Every cover is built from a single object on an empty ground, and every cover is allowed exactly one saturated red element: a bead, a thread, a butterfly, a core, a tear in the paper.
The restraint is what makes six unrelated books read as one body of work. Nothing else is shared — not the palette, not the photography, not even the writing direction. The Persian edition sets right to left and was composed on its own terms rather than mirrored from the English.
Better questions, not final answers.
Site line — hrtorkaman.com
The site
Rooms and maps
The website abandons the usual author-site furniture. There is no shop grid and no bibliography. Each book is a room with its own weather and one excerpt behind a door; each research paper is a map with the PDF inside it.
Navigation uses only those names. A reader arrives at a drifting field of rings and chooses a door, which is closer to how the writing works than a list of titles would be.
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