The Pearl Cannon

The Pearl Cannon begins with an object that once stood in Tehran's Citadel Square: a cannon surrounded by legend. Women visited it in the hope of marriage or fertility, and generations of Tehranis treated it as both relic and talisman. Hedayat takes this strange piece of urban folklore and turns it into one of his most audacious works.

Hedayat's humour is dark, but the laughter is never weightless. Beneath the absurdity lies a sustained attack on superstition and on the language that allows brutality to present itself as virtue. The book moves restlessly through different ages, exposing how old forms of domination return beneath new names.

To the best of the translator's knowledge, this is the first complete English translation of The Pearl Cannon. It has been prepared with close attention to Hedayat's voice and to the difficult music of his prose.

The act of translation does not imply endorsement of the book's religious or political claims. Those views belong to Hedayat and to the satirical world he created. This edition is offered so that English-language readers may encounter another major work by one of Iran's most singular writers.