Modern Persian

Iraj Pezeshkzad, an Iranian writer whose satirical 1973 novel “My Uncle Napoleon,” affectionately skewering the foibles of his countrymen and -women in the decades before the Islamic Revolution, became a phenomenally popular work of modern Persian literature, died Jan. 12 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was believed to be 95.

You’ll find complex stews, crispy rice dishes known as tahdig and even a few modern Persian twists on American ingredients.

Fatemeh Shams, an Iranian poet and professor of modern Persian literature at University of Pennsylvania, said Forough’s poetry was at times seen as so rebellious that it was kept hidden.

Forty miles south of London, in a quiet West Sussex village, lives a 94-year-old Iranian intellectual who has for half a century kept silent about his former lover, a giant of modern Persian literature who was killed in a car accident aged just 32.

In each, Neshat inscribed some part of the anatomy—hands, face, or feet—with tiny calligraphy from modern Persian poetry, in red, black, or both.