The brief and turbulent history of Pakistan has seen pygmies in uniform trumpeted in as saviours of the people all too often. The people of the country that is just fifty-seven years young were subjected to martial law from 1958 to 1988 and these were times when the military rulers willfully demolished all the institutions and popular notions of democracy. The imposition of martial law in 1977 emergence of Zia-ul-Haq as dictator and the execution of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were tragedies that went straight to the hearts of the people. This was the most sorrowful chapter in the country’s history with the never-before onslaught on civil rights and liberties. This was also the time when poets and writers walked along with the political leaders of the country to fight the gun with the pen. Dreams in the form of forty short stories are encased in Children of the Night and these dreams are of tyranny bred. These dreams the writers bequeath to the generations to come so that they may know that freedom is hard won and not something to be frittered away. In the times to come these stories will mirror the truth of the times these were written in just as Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories become the source material for the brutal history of the partition. Stories by celebrated writers of resistance literature of Pakistan, Muhammad Mansha Yaad, Mazhar-ul-Islam, Intizar Hussain, Kaleem Lashari, Farkhanda Lodhi, Fakhar Zaman and others, are included in this volume.
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