Fiction. Translated from the Romanian by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno. KYRA KYRALINA, upon publication early in the nineteen twenties, immediately established its author as a leading writer in the Modernist pantheon. The first volume in a series of volumes indebted to Oriental modes of storytelling, such as found in The Thousand and One Nights, KYRA KYRALINA is a book of great charm and profound insight into the human condition.

Author City: Braila ROM

Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was born in Romania six years after it separated from the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman culture continued to permeate the newly established nation throughout the author's boyhood, however, and he later lived in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople, which would play a central role in his noveil KYRA KYRALINA. Deeply influenced by life in the Middle East and its distinctive narrative traditions, he set KYRA KYRALINA in the 1850s, the waning years of the reign of Sultan Abdulaziz I, when the empire still retained much of its tradition.