Sadegh Hedayat Book order

Exploring themes of love and existential despair, this celebrated work transcends a simple narrative, revealing deeper complexities with each page. The 75th anniversary edition features the first translation endorsed by the Sadegh Hedayat Foundation and utilizes the definitive Bombay edition, ensuring authenticity. Translated by a native speaker, it offers a unique perspective and includes extensive footnotes that clarify Persian cultural references. This edition aims to elevate the Blind Owl into the English literary canon, enriching readers' understanding of Hedayat's profound vision.

This collection of short stories, previously unpublished in English, displays the disturbing and evocative force of Hedayat's writing, and confirms his place in the literary canon. They depict a world of revelation, uncanny similarity, grotesquery and insanity.

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.

The story is narrated by a young man, a painter of miniatures, whose name is never given. He feels an overbearing need to recount an experience he went through that has shattered his whole existence. A beautiful woman, an old man and a cypress tree are the recurring motifs.