Appayya Dīkṣita's Joy of the Night Lily (Kuvalayānanda, c. 1585) is a work that changed the literary landscape of early modern India. Within decades of its composition, the Joy elicited a plethora of written responses in Sanskrit: commentaries, attacks, and rejoinders. Indeed, the Joy soon became the standard textbook on Sanskrit poetics, and it is thus no wonder that major manuscript collections in India often possess more copies of this work than of any other treatise in poetics. Moreover, Appayya's primer inspired a whole library of works: translations, adaptations, and poetic compositions in several Indic languages, including Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Braj. A work that has not received anything like the attention it deserves, Appayya's Joy remains an enigma: what is the secret of its success, why was it so controversial and at the same time so popular, and what was it that literati working in languages other than Sanskrit found so inspiring and, indeed, enjoyable about it?