Selected and translated by writer, editor and translator Muhammad Umar Memon, the twenty-five stories in this book represent the finest short fiction in Urdu literature. In his introduction, Memon traces the evolution of the Urdu story from its origins in the work of writers like Munshi Premchand - 'the first professional short story writer in Urdu' - through the emergence of the Progressives. In the late 1930s, whose writings were unabashedly political and underpinned their Marxist ideologies, to the post-independence 'Modernist' era, and today's generation of avant-garde, experimental writers of Urdu fiction.