Blind Owl cover art

Blind Owl

 Preview

Audible Standard 1-month free trial

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo + applicable tax after 30-day trial. Cancel Anytime
Try for $0.00
More purchase options

Blind Owl

Written by: Sadeq Hedayat, Sassan Tabatabai - introduction, Sassan Tabatabai - translator
Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef, Sassan Tabatabai
Try for $0.00

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $19.11

Buy Now for $19.11

About this listen

 A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century

Winner of the 2023 Lois Roth Persian Translation Award

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. Classics Crime Thrillers Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Thriller & Suspense Crime Thriller Suspense

What the critics say

“a much-needed and clear translation”
—Amir-Hussein Radjy, The New York Times

“The eerie, phantasmal Blind Owl…possesses the fully dimensional oddness of a vivid dream, which one can mine for interpretations, analyze for influences or simply submit to.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
No reviews yet