Sangi bar Guri [A Stone on a Grave] is a candid account of a male Iranian, in this case, a well-known essayist, fiction writer and socially and politically engaged intellectual, in his struggle to cope with his inability to produce offspring. In this book,...

In 1965 Prof. Girdhari Tikku arranged for a meeting of some of the best poets of the time and led them into a conversation about their work. A Conversation with Modern Persian Poets presents the transcription and translation of two afternoons of taped...

This unusual work is comprised of dialogues between Emperor Nur al-Din Jahangir, ruler of the Mughal Empire of India from 1605 - 1627, and “Mutribi” al-Asamm Samarqandi, an elderly visitor from Samarqand, the fabled Central Asian city which had...

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...

This book is an examination of modern Persian literature from its inception in the first decade of the 20th century to the present from a variety of perspectives, including within the context of the sociopolitical events and upheavals in the past 120 years as...

The most internationally recognized Persian fiction writer in the 20th century, Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), was known as a secular intellectual whose controversial views on religion gained him both distractors and supporters in Iran, both during his life and...

Every city has its own identity. In the same way that the identity of the people of a city influences and determines the identity of a city, the identity of a city has an impact on that of its people. In this book, the author explores the major cities of Iran...

Language and Culture in Persian lies at the intersection of what we ordinarily associate with language learning, standard vocabulary, idiom, grammar, etc. and a set of shared assumptions about the world that we call “culture.” The book is about what readers...

What can be said with certainty about Obeyd-e Zakani hardly fills a paragraph. He was born around 1300 near Qazvin, a city in northeastern Iran. Apparently there were two branches of the Zakani clan: one belonging to the minority sect in Islam, Shiism, and...

Nigāristān (compiled 1334–5) is an important work of Persian wisdom literature and one of the first works written on the model of, and in response to, the Guilstān of Saʿdī. Its author, Mu‘īnī...