Fabulous Machinery for the Curious: The Garden of Urdu Classical Literature

An absorbing, joyous, and colorful collection of stories from the qissa genre.

Fabulous Machinery for the Curious presents the first English translation of some of the finest texts from the qissa genre. In this book, acclaimed translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi gathers the greatest of these tales, written or transcribed in the Urdu language by master storytellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Spreading from Persia to Arabia to South Asia over 1,500 years, the qissa appropriated...