The Blind Owl

Tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, the narrator, who sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that "the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life. If at times we come to a halt, we do so to hear the call of death... Throughout our lives, the finger of death points at us." The narrator addresses his murderous confessions to the shadow on his wall resembling an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.

Following a disjointed, vision-like structure, The Blind Owl is the nightmarish exploration of the psyche of a madman. The narrator is an ailing, solitary misanthrope who suffers from hallucinations, and his dreamlike tale is layered, circular, driven by its own demented logic, and punctuated with macabre and surreal episodes such as the discovery of a mutilated corpse, and a bizarre competition in which two men are locked in a dungeon-like room with a cobra. Initially banned in the author's native Iran, the novel first appeared in Tehran in 1941 and became a bestseller. Full of powerful symbolism and terrifying imagery, this dark novella is Hedayat's masterpiece.

The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat is the most influential figure in twentieth-century Persian fiction--and the object of a kind of cult after his suicide in 1951. His masterpiece The Blind Owl is the most important novel of modern Iran. Its abrupt, tortured opening sentence, "There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker," is one of the best known and most frequently recited passages of modern Persian. But underneath the book's uncanniness and its narrative eccentricities, Michael Beard traces an elegant pastiche of familiar Western traditions. A work of advocacy for a disturbing and powerful piece of fiction, his comprehensive analysis reveals the significance of The Blind Owl as a milestone not only for Persian writing but also for world literature. The international, decentered nature of modernist writing outside the West, typified by Hedayat's European education and wide reading in the Western canon, suggested to Beard the strategy of assessing The Blind Owl as if it were a Western novel. Viewed in this context, Hedayat's intricate chronicle challenges the very notion of a national literature, rethinking and reshaping our traditions until we are compelled, "through its eyes," to see them in a new way. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Welcome to The Frankenstein Project by SuperMonsterCity! This edition is the original 1818 text written by Mary Shelley and includes 17 newly created images from artists in 8 countries and from all across the United States. These seventeen artists capture the spirit of key moments within the Shelley novel. Each artist featured in this book will receive a portion of the proceeds. With The Frankenstein Project we are pleased to pay homage to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the enduring legacy of her classic novel. Shelley's "Creature" has provided so much inspiration and consolation to so many, for 200 years. This is the least we at SuperMonsterCity! could do to honor her. Artworks were created in a variety of media, from oil, tempura and watercolor paints, to pen and ink, pencil and charcoal drawings; from digital submissions to sculptures, 3D printed objects, and shadow boxes. The range of interpretations and the contexts is impressive, reflecting the deep and powerful impact of Mary Shelley's influence across the centuries. We hope you enjoy this edition and will continue to support the artists and jurors that made this project possible.

An opium addict spirals into madness after losing a mysterious lover in this “extraordinary work” of modern Persian literature (The Times Literary Supplement, UK). Sadegh Hedayat was Iran’s most renowned modern fiction writer, and his spine-tingling novel The Blind Owl is considered his seminal work. A classic of modern Iranian literature, this edition is presented to contemporary audiences with a new introduction by Porochista Khakpour, one of the most exciting voices from a new generation of Iranian-American authors. A haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation, The Blind Owl tells the story of a young opium addict’s despair after losing a mysterious lover. Through a series of intricately woven events that revolve around the same set of mental images—an old man with a spine-chilling laugh, four cadaverous black horses with rasping coughs, a hidden urn of poisoned wine—the narrator is compelled to record his obsession with a beautiful woman even as it drives him further into frenzy and madness.

"Following a disjointed, vision-like structure, The blind owl is the nightmarish exploration of the psyche of a madman"--Book jacket.

A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century A Penguin Classic Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.