Parvin E'tesami may be called the greatest Iranian poetess in classical style. She witnessed Iran's social, economic, and educational changes which followed the termination of the Qajar dynasty and the beginning of the reign of Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi....

Hassan Sadr, the author of previously unpublished notes on Dr. Mossadegh, is historically important for a number of reasons. He was Dr. Mossadegh’s personal lawyer at various times; represented the country at the International Court of the Hague during the...

"Appointment in Aleppo" was first published in Persian in 2004, although Modarres-Sadeghi had completed the writing of the novel two years earlier, in other words, in the wake of the tragic events of the morning of September 11, 2001, that is, the suicide...

If the Šifāʾ (The Cure, or The Healing) in its entirety deserves to be considered Ibn Sīnā’s masterpiece in philosophy, the same can be said in particular of its metaphysical section (Ilāhiyyāt, Divine Things): this final and culminant part of the entire work...

Thirty years have passed since a shattered Nilufar Hartman, pregnant and betrayed, fled Iran. She barely got out alive, carrying her deepest secrets of love and tragedy. Nilufar had arrived in Tehran in November 1979 to take a job as a junior American...

Considered Hushang Golshiri’s magnum opus and the culmination of all his work in terms of his worldview and more importantly his vision of art and creativity, Book of Jinn is a masterpiece of Persian fiction that has been compares with James Joyce's Ulysses...

Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh (1812-78) was the father of modern Azerbaijani and Persian drama, a man of letters, propagator of a new alphabet, and one of the most outspoken free-thinkers of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century. A reformer and liberal,...

Contemporary Iranian Photography edited by Abbas Daneshvari offers five essays with interpretive comments on the photography of post-1980s Iran, including the emerging style and concepts of the field. The authors note that this art has shown unprecedented...

"Madatolhayat" is one of the few pre-twentieth century Persian culinary sources to have survived. Its author, Nurollah, was the chef to the most renowned king of the Safavid Dynasty, Shah Abbas I (1588-1629). Regarded as one of the greatest monarchs in...

This book is a general survey of language and images that arouse sexual desire. The book begins by examining the works of the great Persian poets and prose authors who avoid direct mention of bodily functions and use imagery borrowed from nature and food when...