Серия "Central Asian Literatures in Translation"

Night and Day (1934), an unfinished dilogy by Uzbek author Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, gives readers a glimpse into the everyday struggles of men and women in Russian imperial Turkestan. More than just historical prose, Cho’lpon’s magnum opus reads as poetic elegy and turns on dramatic irony. Though Night , the first and only extant book of the dilogy, depicts the terrible fate of a young girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton, nothing is what it seems. Readers find themselves...

Very few works of contemporary literature are as politically significant to their own time and place as this one, which asks difficult questions of a small, recently independent country trying to make its way in the world. This book is a literary work of conscience – a work of witness, the result of a lifetime’s experience and observation – by one of the preeminent authors of his country and a former member of Azerbaijan’s National Assembly. This fictional work responds to political upheaval...