Chess with the Doomsday Machine (Shatranj ba Mashin-e Qiamat) is a novel by Habib Ahmadzadeh (b. 1964) about the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). It is set in Ahmadzadeh’s native Abadan, a city located on an island near the Persian Gulf. Because of its...

Choreophobia is the term coined by Dr. Shay, in this first full-length study of Iranian dance, to characterize the widespread ambiguous and negative reactions to solo improvised dance, the most popular dance form in the Iranian world. This dance form appears...

The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete, published for the first time in English, is one of the few non-Persian primary sources on the History of Nader Shah. Written by the Supreme Patriarch of the Armenian Church, it describes the events which occurred from April...

Deacon Zak‘aria (1627-ca. 1699) was a native of K‘anak‘er, who lived and wrote in the great monastery of Hovhannavank‘ in the K‘asagh region of the Khanate of Erevan (eastern Armenia). The Chronicle is written in the spoken dialect of the Erevan region...

This book is the first English language study of Armenian cinema. It is divided into twelve chapters, followed by an appendix on animation. Chapter 1 explores the birth of cinema in Armenia in 1899 with a screening in Yerevan and provides the setting for...

Mulla Nasreddin is one of the most celebrated personalities in Persian folklore. He is a character who appears in thousands of stories, always witty, sometimes wise, even philosophic, sometimes the instigator of practical jokes on others and often a fool or...

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,...

Shaykh Ahmad of Jâm, nicknamed “the Colossal Elephant,” was a popular Muslim saint who lived from 1049 to 1141 in eastern Iran. His career as a religious figure and worker of miracles is here vividly and imaginatively portrayed through delightful and often...

Originally published in two separate volumes, this is the first combined and expanded edition of the popular Aryanpur dictionaries. The authors have carefully re-examined the earlier edition and have added two new introductions in Persian and English. A new...

Sharh ’Asas al-kiyasah is an important, yet little known, philosophical writing of Burhan al-Din Nasafi (d. 684/1286), a leading member of the intellectual School of Ma-wara’-al-nahr. In this work, Nasafi has followed the lead of the Peripatetics, notably...