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Synopsis Downfall by Degrees brings you three short stories and two novellas by Abdullah Hussein, recipient of the Adamjee Award, Pakistan's highest literary prize. Hussein holds a towering position in the world of Urdu fiction and his stories probe, with masterful precision and exquisite balance, the condition of the modern man at odds with himself. His microscopic eye is trained on the underside of pain in a language that is stark and telling. The characters of these stories, in bearing their fate with proud but quiet dignity, leave us with an enduring impression of their doomed struggle despite presenting a shattered image of the self-oppressed by guilt and exile. It is not the final physical phenomenon of vanishing, which is the central them in the fiction of Abdullah Hussein, but the process, the slow process of deterioration, of the weakening of human faculties.. that is the signature of his work.