"Firdaus, The Beautiful" is an excerpt of Kashmiri writer Ash Kaul's unpublished novel. Kaul was a finalist in the 2023 Ink Across Borders Prize by the European Society of literature and a two-time finalist in the Montana Prize in fiction. His stories appear in Indiana Review, Terrain, Consequence, Another Chicago Magazine, X-R-A-Y, and Reflex Fiction. His political satire appears in Barzakh, The Satirist, Bella Caledonia and in his column in LITRO.
