This book is a translation of Sadeq Hedayat’s Neyrangestan, a collection of Persian beliefs and customs, including Persian tales, legends, myths, and proverbs, among other issues. A major interest of Hedayat was to collect and study Iranian folklore systematically. Although prior to Neyrangestan, he had published a short book called Owsaneh, a collection of nursery rhymes, children’s verses, and folksongs, the actual result of his quest to collect and examine folklore material from the Persian oral tradition was mainly published in Neyrangestan.

Following a scholarly introduction, in various chapters of this book, Hedayat expounds on numerous Iranian customs and traditions that often date back to earlier centuries, even to pre-Islamic Iran, regarding marriage, pregnancy, diseases, dreams, death, proverbs, traditional medicine, animals, demons, ancient festivals, and superstitions, among others. He attributes many of the superstitious beliefs to alien cultures, such as those of the Greeks, Parthians, Romans, and Semites, beliefs which, according to Hedayat, were injected into Persian culture through religions, in particular, Islam.

Neyrangestan is considered by many scholars to be a pioneering work in Persian folklore studies, one that should be made available to students of literature, anthropology, and other fields, as well as scholars and students interested in the history of folklore studies in Iran.