Along with its central narrative, 99 Nights in Logar is made up of a number of tales told to the protagonist by his parents, relatives, and other Logarian. The following is an exclusive reading of one of these tales by the author.

Jamil Jan Kochai was born in Peshawar, Pakistan but originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his novel, 99 Nights in Logar, is forthcoming with Viking Books in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. His fiction has been published in Ploughshares, A Public Space, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, and is forthcoming in The Sewanee Review.