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Fire Dances
Paperback
Series: Margellos World Republic of Letters
Publisher Price: $18.00
ISBN13: 9780300303193
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Jun 29 2027
Pages: 96
Language: English
A dazzling novel of exile, art, and the mysteries of the afterlife, from National Book Award Finalist Hamid Ismailov
At the funeral of their late teacher, a group of elderly dance students gather to piece together the little they knew about her. Who was the woman they called Faya--Fire? Where had she come from, and why? As her ghost looks on from the smoke of the crematorium, the shape of a remarkable life slowly emerges: a grandfather whose book of demons Faya could not forget; years dancing ballet in Budapest; a son, imprisoned and embittered, turning to mysticism to uncover the family history he was never told.
Structured like a sequence of group dances, Fire Dances choreographs the tragic arc of Faya's life of displacement. Moving across centuries and continents, from a sixteenth-century Central Asian workshop to a Soviet ballet school, and from the conflagrations of this life to the flames of the next, this journey of the imagination is a tribute to the lives and memories forged in the crucible of exile--and to the many ways that cultural and religious identities can spin across the stage, take miraculous leaps, and land in unexpected places.
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