Here are 100 books that Isfahan and Its Palaces fans have personally recommended if you like
Isfahan and Its Palaces.
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I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
This is a book that changed my sense as to what we could know of the past. Its unlocking of the “secret” or lost religious codes of Persian miniature painting has proved utterly game-changing in the field of Islamic art.
I love it for the incredible beauty of its argumentation, as well as the gorgeousness of its close readings of medieval illuminated painting.
In terms of elucidating inner meaning and symbolism, the study of medieval Islamic art has lagged almost a full century behind that of medieval Western art. This groundbreaking work suggests how it might at last prove possible to crack the allegorical code of medieval Islamic painting during its Golden Age between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Barry focuses his study around the work of Bihzad, a painter who flourished in the late fifteenth century in the kingdom of Herat, now in Afghanistan. Bihzad became the undisputed master of the "Persian miniature" and an almost mythical personality throughout Asian Islam. By…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
Have you ever read a book about a place which then allowed you to see that location in utterly new and thrilling ways?
As well as being a great study of a wonderful artistic culture, this is, for me, one of the greatest studies of a city and the place of its people, their beliefs, and their art in making it unique.
If that was not enough, it also constitutes one of the most important bodies of conceptual and theoretical thinking about the nature and character of Islamic art.
"A Saint in the City" examines the elaborate visual culture of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement based upon the mystical teachings of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1953-1927). In the boldly visual city of Dakar, images abound despite the fact that Senegal is largely a Muslim country. Vibrant street murals, calligraphy and calligrams, didactic posters, drawings that protect and heal, advertising images, colourful clothing, Web sites, intricate glass paintings, and innovative architecture all attest to the transformative potency that expressive culture has for Mourides. One image is ubiquitous throughout urban Senegal: the portrait of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, based upon a colonial…
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
I love the open-mindedness of this book and the way in which it can open your mind as a reader.
Can pictures think for themselves? How do pictures communicate with each other and with their audiences? These are the kinds of questions that this pathbreaking work opens up to its audience.
It also changed my sense as to how photography and painting/prints relate to each other, as well as providing a strong defence of the idea that deep cultural critique can be founded upon the study of quite ordinary objects and texts.
'Photos of the Gods' is a comprehensive history of India's popular visual culture. Combining anthropology, political and cultural history, and the study of aesthetic systems, and using many intriguing and unfamiliar images, the book shows that the current predicament of India cannot be understood without taking into account this complex, fascinating, and until now virtually unseen, visual history.
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
This was the book that convinced me that it is worthwhile exploring the past so as to rediscover and rethink works of art made by indigenous people living under imperial conditions.
I love its movement around the world, the close readings of works that no other scholars had ever considered, and the moral urgency that underpins every one of its lines.
It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of Indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However colonized locals did more than merely collect material for interested colonizers. In developing the concept of anachronism for the analysis of colonial material this book writes the complex biographies for five key objects that exemplify, embody, and refract the tensions of nineteenth-century history. Through an analysis of particular language notations and drawings hidden in colonial documents and a reexamination of cross-cultural communication, the book writes…
I started travelling to paint and draw when I was an art student, first in Manchester and then at the Royal College of Art in London. I applied for drawing scholarships to help enable my travels. I wanted to see and draw the world in my own way. I’ve never really liked reading travel guidebooks. They date so quickly and can be too limiting but I’ve always enjoyed reading books by people who travel. You get a much truer sense of a place from someone who has followed a passion to somewhere remote. When I travel I look for stories on my journeys, something to bring home.
It was first published in 1937 and the book is an account of a journey Robert Byron made through Persia and Afghanistan in 1933.
The Oxiana he writes about no longer exists having been torn apart by wars and revolutions. I read of his visit to see the Buddhas in Bamian with an ache. I wish they had never been destroyed.
His conversational narrative vividly describes life in towns and villages and the people he meets and their ways of living. He is driven by a love for Islamic architecture that lures him to make this journey.
He attends tea parties and fancy dress balls in remote consulates that now seem absurd but they were no doubt fun at the time and a welcome break.
"The Road to Oxiana" is an account of Robert Byron’s ten-month journey to Iran and Afghanistan in 1933–34 in the company of Christopher Sykes. This travelogue is considered by many modern travel writers to be the first example of great travel writing. Bruce Chatwin has described it as “a sacred text, beyond criticism” and carried his copy since he was fifteen years old, “spineless and floodstained” after four journeys through central Asia.By the Si-o-seh pol bridge in Isfahan, Iran, Byron wrote: “The lights came out. A little breeze stirred, and for the first time in four months I felt a…
Growing up during the Cold War, I became interested in Communism early. I read about how the Communist International worked to spread the world revolution. Despite its Eurocentrism, Communism appealed to people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. However, it failed to make meaningful inroads in the Middle East. I wanted to know why. When I trained to become a historian, my curiosity turned towards the Arab world. I decided to combine my two interests and research the history of Arab Communist movements. I discovered a fascinating world of firebrand activists struggling against the tide of nationalism, fascism, and religious bigotry. I hope you find these books as gripping as I did.
This is the go-to book for the early Communist movement in Iran. Unlike the Arab countries of the Middle East, where Communism slowly spread in the early decades of the twentieth century, Iran experienced Communism as Soviet foreign policy in a direct manner. Bordering the Soviet Union, northern Iran was the subject of early attempts to spread the Communist creed in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Zabih’s book tells the story of those early inroads and the Iranian activists supporting the new ideology. The early attempts failed, but by the 1940s, the Communist Tudeh Party had emerged as a popular mass party. Zabih’s narrative is lucid, and his research is based on Soviet and Iranian materials.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
Allison Levy holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance art and architecture from Bryn Mawr College. She has published five books on Italian visual culture, and has taught in the US, Italy, and the UK. She oversees the digital publishing program at Brown University.
This #1 New York Times bestseller grapples with what houses say about who we are—or want to become. Slip into a tragic entanglement between Massoud Behrani, a recent immigrant from Iran intent on restoring his family’s honor by purchasing a California bungalow up for auction, and Kathy Nicolo, the house’s owner, and a recovering drug addict determined to hold on to her family property. This penetrating novel will satisfy readers’ unquenchable thirst for stories that explore the psychological ramifications of emotional and social overinvestment in the promise of a house.
A recent immigrant from the Middle East-a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force-yearns to restore his family's dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left?her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.
Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters-people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on-careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.
My career has taken me zero millimeters from a large college, Christ Church, to a small, adjacent one, Corpus Christi, in 1971. In my mind, though, I have crisscrossed the world, leaping back in time to late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and nowhere proved more fascinating than Iran, which I have visited twice, in 1998 and 2002. I have written about different facets of its history at the end of antiquity, in particular its dominant role in the India trade and the coming of the Arabs.
Great writers of the past are revered in Iran, none more so than Hafiz. One of the most magical places in the country is the garden around his alabaster tomb in Shiraz. Dominic Brookshank whisks one far from the Western present into an extraordinary world of high culture in Shiraz in the fourteenth century.
He has helped me understand Hafiz’s ghazals, short lyric poems full of cryptic allusions. I am still dumbfounded at what they reveal of small elite gatherings of the court, at which wine is drunk (and praised), and Hafiz casts rapt, homoerotic gazes at young males. What an extraordinary disjunction with ordinary life in the Islamic world!
Despite his towering presence in premodern Persian letters, Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1390) remains an elusive and opaque character for many. In order to look behind the hyperbole that surrounds Hafiz's poetry and penetrate the quasi-hagiographical film that obscures the poet himself, this book attempts a contextualisation of Hafiz that is at once socio-political, historical, and literary. Here, Hafiz's ghazals (short, monorhyme, broadly amorous lyric poems) are read comparatively against similar texts composed by his less-studied rivals in the hyper competitive, imitative, and profoundly intertextual environment of fourteenth-century Shiraz. By bringing Hafiz's lyric poetry into productive, detailed…
I’ve always loved to read, but on the other hand, there are few good books by and about Persian Americans. I took it upon myself to begin writing fiction about the Persian-Jewish American experience to preserve a limited historical window that is almost closed. As a third-generation Persian-American, I want readers to enjoy the transition story of an elegant, humorous, and diligent people. I continue to gobble up the literature of the Persian Americans, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. I haven’t run across any works from a Zoroastrian yet, but I’m hoping to!
My favorite line from this book is “When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings.”
I appreciated this book when I read it the first time, and I recently re-read it. Immigrant stories are half-and-half: how it was there, and how it is here. For those of us who are second or third-generation, we rely upon those who remember or record how it was there.
Often those stories focus on only the good things, omitting the trauma. Hakakian wonderfully balances the memories of Iran in its beauty and ugliness. This is an excellent snapshot of revolution-era Iran and how Jews were able to interact with their Muslim neighbors before and after the fall of the Shah.
An emotional, evocative coming-of-age story about one deeply intelligent and perceptive girl’s attempt to find her own voice in prerevolutionary Iran
“An immensely moving, extraordinarily eloquent, and passionate memoir.”—Harold Bloom
Roya Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a household that hummed with intellectual life. Family gatherings were punctuated by witty, satirical exchanges and spontaneous recitations of poetry. But the Hakakians were also part of the very small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
My career has taken me zero millimeters from a large college, Christ Church, to a small, adjacent one, Corpus Christi, in 1971. In my mind, though, I have crisscrossed the world, leaping back in time to late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and nowhere proved more fascinating than Iran, which I have visited twice, in 1998 and 2002. I have written about different facets of its history at the end of antiquity, in particular its dominant role in the India trade and the coming of the Arabs.
I well remember following the sequence of events–a terrible fire that killed 430 trapped in a cinema in Abadan, riots, mass shootings by the army, strikes, politicization, and Islamicization of students–which culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Like many others I was both excited and filled with foreboding at the time. To read Desmond Harney’s eyewitness account is to be carried right into the middle of things. I was utterly gripped as the Iranian middle classes grasped at forlorn hopes and as those hopes faded away in the face of the ‘single-mindedness, implacability, fierce puritanism and commanding authority’ of Ayatollah Khomeini.
The author, a former British diplomat, was living in Tehran during the build-up to the Iranian Revolution and kept a day-to-day account of the events he witnessed, as the priest and the king - the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shah - squared up to each other. The author's faithfully recorded responses - of hope, fear, confusion, scepticism and ultimately despair - reflect with substantial accuracy the spirit in Iran as the country swung from being a docile, Western-orientated ally to an unpredictable, brooding, revolutionary state. Harney had access to all elements of Iran's political elite, including the Shah, and was…
