Shahrnush Pārsipur (b. 1946; heretoforth Pārsipur), a pioneer of Persian magical realist fiction, transcends traditional boundaries of the genre to offer a re-evaluation of Iranian history spanning from the late nineteenth century to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Rather than deploying magical realism to highlight the intrinsic connection between the supernatural and the real, or to narrate the collective trauma of a nation by resurrecting and reconstructing a lost mythic history, Parsipur uses magical realism to critique the effects of significant historical currents on Iranian women. She strategically introduces magical characters and incidents to challenge the male-dominated proclivities of Iranian culture and society. In this essay I analyze three of her renowned works, Sag va Zemestān-e Boland (The Dog and the Long Winter) (1976), Tubā va Ma‘nā-ye Shab (Tubā and the Meaning of the Night) (1989), and Zanān-e Bedun-e Mardān (Women without Men) (1990), and argues that Parsipur employs magical realist conventions to craft fantastical and uncanny settings, events, and characters, to critique patriarchal norms and political movements in modern Iran without condemning men or specific political ideologies and socioeconomic classes.