Amid ethnic violence, political corruption, and petty professional
intrigue, an artist tries to live free of lies.
Set during the last years of the Soviet Union, Stone
Dreams tells the story of Azerbaijani actor Sadai Sadygly, who lands
in a Baku hospital while trying to protect an elderly Armenian man from a gang
of young Azerbaijanis. Something of a modern-day Don Quixote, Sadai has long
battled the hatred and corruption he observes in contemporary Azerbaijani
society. Wandering in and out of consciousness, he revisits his hometown, the
ancient village of Aylis, where Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris once
lived peacefully together, and dreams of making a pilgrimage of atonement to
Armenia. Stone Dreams is a searing, painful meditation on
the ability of art and artists-of individual human beings-to make change in the
world.
Über den Autor Akram Aylisli
Akram Aylisli is an Azerbaijani writer, playwright,
novelist, and editor. His works have been translated from his native Azeri into
more than 20 languages. The 2012 publication of his novella Stone Dreams led to
book burnings and the continuous harassment of the author himself. Since 2016
he has lived under a politically motivated criminal investigation and
corresponding restrictions on his activities in Baku, Azerbaijan.Katherine E. Young is the
author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day
of the Border Guards and the editor of Written in Arlington. She
is the translator of work by Anna Starobinets (memoir), Akram Aylisli (fiction),
and numerous Russophone poets. Young was named a 2017 National Endowment for
the Art translation fellow. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet
Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.