Bibliotheca Iranica.

Othello in Wonderland and Mirror-Polishing Storytellers are two post-revolutionary Persian plays by Gholamhoseyn Saedi, the prominent fiction writer and best-known Iranian playwright of this century. In these plays, Saedi deals with the most vital issues facing the people of his country after the establishment of the Islamic government in Iran. Written in exile in Paris, these plays display a boldness and fearless disregard for censorship. In Othello in Wonderland, which is a fictional case study of censorship, a theatrical troupe tries to stage the Shakespearean play, Othello, with tragic, albeit humorous, consequences as a result of the clashes of views and ideologies of the officials and supporters of the Islamic regime and the secular intelligentsia in Iran. Mirror-Polishing Storytellers, on the other hand, is an explicitly anti-war play in which Saedi presents gruesome pictures of war and its effects on individuals and families.

"Hasan Javadi presents a survey of the subject often only briefly mentioned, or entirely disregarded, in many histories of English Literature. Students of that literature know of Edward FitzGerald's Ruba'iyyat or Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, but many are unaware of the fascination that the East, including Persia, has exercised over European minds. Though dealing primarily with English literature, Javadi includes in his account some continental European Orientalists of note as well. Beginning in the late Middle Ages when the Bible and the classics were the main sources of information about Persia; the book covers the 16th and 17th centuries, when travel was beginning to increase Western knowledge about the East. There is a detailed account of Persian themes in Romantic poetry and prose, and a discussion of the works of travelers and novelists such as James Morier, whose Hajji Baba of Ispahan is still a popular novel for many Iranians."--Jacket.

The Myth of Creation [Afsaneh-ye Afarinesh] is one of the earliest works by Iran's best-known twentieth-century writer, Sadeq Hedayat, whose popularity outside Iran is due mostly to his short novel, The Blind Owl. Little has been written in critical literature about this work, perhaps because critics find the subject matter too sensitive for its generally Jewish, Christian and Moslem audiences. Given the general plot line of this story, Hedayat demonstrates an open skepticism towards the three major Middle Eastern religions, particularly Islam, by casting the characters of his story in the form of puppets. This suggests that even the "creator," as perceived by these three religions, is a mere puppet controlled by unseen hands.