Download or read book A Persian Requiem written by Simin Daneshvar and published by Halban Publishers. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tribal leaders in opposition to the government, the corruption of occupation, society torn apart by shifting political loyalties... this is the background to one woman's powerful story. A Persian Requiem is a powerful and evocative novel. Set in the southern Persian town of Shiraz in the last years of World War II, when the British army occupied the south of Persia, the novel chronicles the life of Zari, a traditional, anxious and superstitious woman whose husband, sef, is an idealistic feudal landlord. The occupying army upsets the balance of traditional life and throws the local people into conflict. sef is anxious to protect those who depend upon him and will stop at nothing to do so. His brother, on the other hand, thinks nothing of exploiting his kinsmen to further his own political ambitions. Thus a web of political intrigue and hostilities is created, which slowly destroys families. In the background, tribal leaders are in open rebellion against the government, and a picture of a society torn apart by unrest emerges. In the midst of this turbulence, normal life carries on in the beautiful courtyard of Zari's house, in the rituals she imposes upon herself and in her attempt to keep the family safe from external events. But the corruption engendered by occupation is pervasive - some try to profit as much as possible from it, others look towards communism for hope, whilst yet others resort to opium. Finally even Zari's attempts to maintain normal family life are shattered as disaster strikes. An immensely moving story, A Persian Requiem is also a powerful indictment of the corrupting effects of colonization. A Persian Requiem (first published in 1969 in Iran under the title Savushun), was the first novel written by an Iranian woman and, sixteen reprints and half a million copies later, it remains the most widely read Persian novel. In Iran it has helped shape the ideas and attitudes of a generation in its revelation of the factors that contributed to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Simin Daneshvar's A Persian Requiem ... goes a long way towards deepening our understanding of Islam and the events leading up to the 1979 Revolution ... The central characters adroitly reflect different Persian attitudes of the time, attitudes that were eventually to harden into support for either the Ayatollah and his Islamic fundamentalism or, alternatively, for the corrupting Westernisation of the Shah. The value of the book lies in its ability to present these emergent struggles in human terms, in the day-to-day realities of small-town life ... Complex and delicately crafted, this subtle and ironic book unites reader and writer in the knowledge that human weakness, fanaticism, love and terror are not confined to any one creed. The Financial Times A Persian Requiem is not just a great Iranian novel, but a world classic. The Independent on Sunday ... it would be no exaggeration to say that all of Iranian life is there. Spare Rib For an English reader, there is almost an embarrassment of new settings, themes and ideas ... Under the guise of something resembling a family saga - although the period covered is only a few months - A Persian Requiem teaches many lessons about a society little understood in the West. Rachel Billington, The Tablet This very human novel avoids ideological cant while revealing complex political insights, particularly in light of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Publishers Weekly A Persian Requiem, originally published [in Iran] in 1969, was a first novel by Iran's first woman novelist. It has seen sixteen reprints, sold over half a million copies, and achieved the status of a classic, literally shaping the ideas of a generation. Yet when asked about the specific appeal of the novel, most readers are at a loss to pinpoint a single, or even prominent aspect to account for this phenomenal success. Is it the uniquely feminine perspective, allowing the read

Download or read book Sutra and Other Stories written by Simin Daneshvar and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six stories by an Iranian novelist. The title piece is on a smuggler who forces his wife and daughter into prostitution, Potshard is about a white woman who tries to adopt a village orphan, and Anis is on how a woman adjusts to new husbands. By the author of Savushun.

Download or read book Savushun written by Sīmīn Dānishvar and published by Washington, D.C. : Mage Publishers. This book was released on 1990 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A very engaging saga...'Washington Post Book World?A powerfully resonant work...'Publishers Weekly?Outstanding foreign fiction...'USA TodaySavushun (pronounced ?sa-voo-shoon?) is a folk tradition, surviving in Southern Iran from an undateable pre-islamic past, that conjures hope in spite of everything.The novel chronicles the life of a Persian family during the World War II Allied occupation of Iran. It is set in Shiraz, a town which evokes images of Persepolis and pre-islamic monuments, the great Persian poets, the shrines, sufis and nomadic tribes all within a historical web of the interests, privilege and influence of foreign powers, corruption, incompetence and arrogance of persons in authority. The story is seen through the eyes of Zari, a young wife, and mother, who copes with her idealistic husband while struggling with her desire for traditional family life and her need for an individual identity.simin daneshvar lives and continues to write in Iran.

Download or read book The Politics of Writing in Iran written by Kamran Talattof and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a secular activity, Persian literature acquired its own modernity by redefining past aesthetic practices of identity and history. By analyzing selected work of major pre- and post-revolutionary literary figures, Talattof shows how Persian literary history has not been an integrated continuum but a series of distinct episodic movements shaped by shifting ideologies. Drawing on western concepts, modern Persian literature has responded to changing social and political conditions through complex strategies of metaphorical and allegorical representations that both construct and denounce cultural continuities. The book provides a unique contribution in that it draws on texts that demonstrate close affinity to such diverse ideologies as modernism, Marxism, feminism, and Islam. Each ideological standard has influenced the form, characterization, and figurative language of literary texts as well as setting the criteria for literary criticism and determining which issues are to be the focus of literary journals.

Download or read book Things We Left Unsaid written by Zoya Pirzad and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep in an Iranian suburb, made rich by the booming oil industry, Clarice Ayvazian lives a comfortable life surrounded by the gentle bickering of her children and her gossiping friends and relatives. Happy being at the heart of her family, she devotes herself to their every need. But when an enigmatic Armenian family move in across the street, something begins to gnaw at Clarice's contentment: a feeling that there may be more to life – and to her – than this. Dizzy with the sweltering heat and simmering emotions, Clarice begins to feel herself come alive to possibilities previously unimaginable. Set in Iran prior to the Islamic revolution, Zoya Pirzad's award-winning novel crafts an intimate portrait of family life – its joys and its compromises – and how we find a happiness that endures. For fans of Anne Tyler, Things We Left Unsaid is a humourous and pointed insight into the hopes and aspirations of Iranians in the years that led to the Islamic Revolution.

Download or read book The Israeli Republic written by Jalal Al-e Ahmad and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Israeli Republic "suggests how the Iranian and Israeli leaders who feel such intense mutual hostility today actually mirror one another in certain ways, particularly in their foundational attitudes toward religious authority, political and economic populism and the West. That a writer such as Al-e Ahmad, guru to the ayatollahs, liked Israel now seems touching. What he liked about Israel seems cautionary." —Bernard Avishai, Foreign Affairs Written by a preeminent Iranian writer who helped lay the popular groundwork for the Iranian Revolution, The Israeli Republic should be required reading for anyone interested in the history and current political landscape of the Middle East. Documenting Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s two-week-long trip to Israel in February of 1963, his account “Journey to the Land of Israel” caused a firestorm when it was published in Iran, upsetting the very revolutionary clerics whose anti-Western sentiments Al-e Ahmad himself had fueled. Yet, in the thriving Jewish State, Jalal Al-e Ahmad saw a model for a possible future Iran. Based on his controversial travelogue, supplemented with letters between the author and his wife, Simin Daneshvar (the first major Iranian woman novelist), and translated into English for the first time, The Israeli Republic is a record of Al-e Ahmad’s idealism, insight, and ultimate disillusionment toward Israel. Vibrantly modern in its sensibility and fearlessly polemical, this book will change the way you think about the Middle East.

Download or read book Erin and Iran written by H. E. Chehabi and published by Ilex Series. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Erin and Iran, North American and European scholars consider parallel themes in and interactions between Irish and Iranian cultures from ancient times to the twentieth century. These studies of mythology, literature, and travelogues constitute the first-ever volume dealing with cultural encounters between the Irish and the Iranians

Download or read book Daneshvar s Playhouse written by Simin Daneshvar and published by Mage Pub. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These stories not only portray, with incomparable perception, humour, and compassion, women from the various strata of Iranian society, but they also capture the essence of a rich traditional culture undergoing change. A nanny lets go of a little girl's hand in Shiraz's exotic and crowded Vakil Bazaar, and goes off to flirt with the nutseller -- the child is lost. In The Accident, the author portrays, in hilarious parody, a young woman who forsakes husband, children, and home just to own a car. The Playhouse is a traditional Persian theatre where the play and the players act on many levels both real and fantastic. The Traitor's Intrigue lets you into the life of a middle-class couple and brilliantly shows how a colonel's allegiance passed from Shah to Khomeini. To Whom Can I Say Hello? tells of an old woman's memories, her life, love, tragic outcome, and eventual hope. Loss of Jalal is a moving chronicle of the final days of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of Iran's great writers and the author's husband. Simin Daneshvar draws from over a thousand years of Persian storytelling tradition and combines this with modern techniques of short fiction and cinema. The result is both entertaining and a key of uncompromising honesty, rich detail, and a dazzling range of voices that guides the reader into the centre of a complex society and its concerns.

Download or read book Persian Language Literature and Culture written by Kamran Talattof and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical approaches to the study of topics related to Persian literature and Iranian culture have evolved in recent decades. The essays included in this volume collectively demonstrate the most recent creative approaches to the study of the Persian language, literature, and culture, and the way these methodologies have progressed academic debate. Topics covered include; culture, cognition, history, the social context of literary criticism, the problematics of literary modernity, and the issues of writing literary history. More specifically, authors explore the nuances of these topics; literature and life, poetry and nature, culture and literature, women and literature, freedom of literature, Persian language, power, and censorship, and issues related to translation and translating Persian literature in particular. In dealing with these seminal subjects, contributors acknowledge and contemplate the works of Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and other pioneering critics, analysing how these works have influenced the field of literary and cultural studies. Contributing a variety of theoretical and inter-disciplinary approaches to this field of study, this book is a valuable addition to the study of Persian poetry and prose, and to literary criticism more broadly.

Download or read book Heremakhonon written by Maryse Condé and published by Three Continents. This book was released on 2000 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veronica Mercier, a sophisticated Caribbean woman teaching and living in Paris, goes to a West African country to complete her search for self-identity. There, she finds herself involved with a nigger with ancestors - a cold, calculating minister for the interior and heir to the presidency.

Download or read book Unexceptional written by Marc J. O'Reilly and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unexceptional: America's Empire in the Persian Gulf, 1941-2007 examines U.S. policy vis-^-vis the Persian Gulf since the Second World War. It asserts that the American experience in this strategic yet volatile region known for its plentiful oil and gas can be best understood as an unexceptional imperial endeavor similar in kind to that of the British, Ottoman, and other empires in previous centuries. Since 1941, the U.S. empire in the Gulf has achieved successes such as Operation Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq. Setbacks have included the Iranian Revolution and the ongoing occupation of Iraq. Given these and many other events, which this book spotlights, America's Gulf empire has undergone repeated expansion and contraction_a typical imperial pattern. The result has been a cycle of waxing and waning U.S. influence in a critical region of the world. Until its occupation of Iraq, the United States practiced informal empire in the Gulf rather than colonialism. Currently, however, the formal empire established by the United States in Iraq jeopardizes the overall American position in the Gulf, which seemed unassailable in early 2003.

Download or read book Veils and Words written by Farzaneh Milani and published by I.B.Tauris. This book was released on 1992 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in any language about the writing of women in Iran. For centuries any sense that there could be a literary tradition among women was suppressed. Since the middle of the 19th century, however, a number a of pioneering women have defied the traditional order to produce poetry and novels of the highest quality; but many of them have paid for their courage with accusations of immorality, promiscuity, heresy and even lunacy.

Download or read book The Book of Fate written by Parinoush Saniee and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as one of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2013 Spanning five turbulent decades in Iranian history, from before the 1979 revolution, through the Islamic Republic, and up to the present, The Book of Fate is a powerful story of friendship and passion, fear and hope. A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an average girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in love, but when her family discovers his letters they accuse her of bringing them dishonour. She is badly beaten by her brother, and her parents hastily arrange for her to marry a man she’s never met. Facing a life without love, and the prospect of no education, Massoumeh is distraught, but a female neighbour urges her to comply: "We each have a destiny, and you can’t fight yours." The years that follow Massoumeh’s wedding prove transformative for Iran. Hamid, Massoumeh’s husband, is a political dissident and a threat to the Shah’s regime. When the secret service arrive to arrest him, it is the start of a terrifying period for Massoumeh. Her fate, so long dictated by family loyalty and tradition, is now tied to the changing fortunes of her country.

Download or read book To Keep the Sun Alive written by Rabeah Ghaffari and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How do we recognize the moment our future has been written for us? In To Keep the Sun Alive, as the Islamic Revolution looms just outside the gate of an Iranian family orchard, Rabeah Ghaffari has built a world so lush, so precise that you will find yourself rewriting history if only to imagine it could still exist.”—Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing "[A] tenderhearted début novel . . . A wide–ranging narrative, showing the enduring ramifications of filial and political violence." —The New Yorker The year is 1979. The Iranian Revolution is just around the corner. In the northeastern city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi–Khanoom, continue to run their ancient family orchard, growing apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace where the judge and his wife mediate disputes between aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews that foreshadow the looming national crisis to come. Will the monarchy survive the revolutionary tide gathering across the country? Will the judge’s brother, a powerful cleric, take political control of the town or remain only a religious leader? And yet, life goes on. Bibi–Khanoom’s grandniece secretly falls in love with the judge’s grandnephew and dreams of a career on the stage. His other grandnephew withers away on opium dreams. A widowed father longs for a life in Europe. A strained marriage slowly unravels. The orchard trees bloom and fruit as the streets in the capital grow violent. And a once–in–a–lifetime solar eclipse, set to occur on one of the holiest days of year, finally causes the family—and the country—to break. Told through a host of unforgettable characters, ranging from servants and young children to intimate friends, To Keep the Sun Alive reveals the personal behind the political, reminding us of the human lives that animate historical events.

Download or read book Sasanian Persia written by Touraj Daryaee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation Of profound importance in late antiquity,the Sasanian Empire is almost completely unknown today,except as a counterpoint to the Roman Empire.What are the reasons for this ignorance and why does the Sasanian Empire matter? In this brilliant and highly readable new history Touraj Daryaee fills a huge gap in our knowledge of world history.He examines the Sasanians'complex and colourful narrative and demonstrates their unique significance,not only for the development of Iranian civilisation but also for Roman and Islamic history. The Sasanians were the last of the ancient Persian dynasties and are best known as the preeminent practitioners of the Zoroastrian religion.From its foundation by Ardashir I in 224 CE, the Sasanian Empire was the dominant force in the Middle East for several centuries until its last king, Yazdgerd III, was defeated by the Muslim Arabs,whose horsemen swept away his seemingly far more powerful empire in the 7th century.Theirs was the first post Hellenic civilisation in the Near East to operate on an imperial scale and its sphere of influence and contact was unparalleled-from India to the Levant and from the Arabian Peninsula to the Caspian Sea. In this concise yet comprehensive new book,Touraj Daryaee provides an unrivalled account of Sasanian Persia.Drawing on extensive new sources he paints a vivid portrait of Sasanian life and unravels the divergent strands that contributed to the making of this great Empire:religion-not just Zoroastrianism but also Manichaeaism;the economy;administration;the multiple languages and their literature as well as the Empire's often neglected social history. Daryaee also explores - for the first time in an integrated book on the Sasanians-their descendants'attempts for more than a century after their defeat to establish a second state and reveals how their values and traditions have endured,both in Iranian popular culture and in the literary tradition of the Persian language and literature,to the present day. Sasanian Persia is a unique examination of a period of history that still has great significance for a full understanding of modern Iran.

Download or read book Dreams Of Trespass written by Fatima Mernissi and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1995-09-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.

Download or read book Seasons of Purgatory written by Shahriar Mandanipour and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian), “a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran” (Wall Street Journal) In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.