In the last 15 years, Nazan Bekiroglu has captured the attention of Turkish literary critics and soul-searching readers with her poetic reworking of Qur’anic stories key to classic Sufi literature and her exploration of key spaces in Ottoman and ancient Anatolian history via unusual narrative perpectives. Bekiroglu’s best-selling version of the story of Yûsuf and Züleyha, first published in 2002, draws upon a long tradition of tasavvuf literature, including Molla Câmi’s Yusuf u Züleyha; however, I will argue in this paper that this text’s guiding structure, multiplicity of perspective, meta-narrative elements, and reliance upon word play render it a highly self-referential postmodern text, one that engages the contemporary reader by placing him/her alternatively “inside” and “outside the moment”. In other words, Bekiroglu’s Yûsuf ile Züleyha’s resonance with Turkish readers today derives not only from the text’s re-exploration of “timeless themes” – dreams, fate, love, death, beauty, treachery, sorrow, jealousy, estrangement and homecoming, separation and union, etc. – but also from the way in which already known paths of exploring those themes are referenced and classical motifs, varied and played upon in order to highlight commonalities and differences in historical and contemporary human experience. My analysis of Bekiroglu’s use of narrative frame(s), shifting perspectives, imagery, poetic word play, and historical and literary references will cross-reference Qur’anic and Biblical versions of the Yusuf/Joseph story as well as selected, influential Persian and Turkish versions of the tale, focusing primarily on differences in narrative structure, sequencing and symbolic loci, in an attempt to show what is original and striking in this contemporary Turkish author’s work. In closing, I will briefly discuss the related challenges to translating Bekiroglu’s novels and essays to English.