Turkish Literature in English Translation: Turkish Literature in English Translation

Listen to Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love reviewed on NPR   In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives--one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz--that together incarnate the poet's timeless message of love. Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mir#65533;rors her own and that Zahara--like Shams--has come to set her free.

Honour is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children.In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to
fit in. After Adem abandons his family, Iskender, the eldest son, must step in and become the one who will not let any shame come to the family name. And when Pembe begins a chaste affair with a man named Elias, Iskender will discover that you could love someone with all your heart and yet be ready to hurt them. Just published to great acclaim in England, Honor is a powerful, gripping exploration of guilt and innocence, loyalty and betrayal, and the trials of the immigrant, as well as the love and heartbreak that too often tear families apart

"This edition of Halide Edib's Memoirs, prefaced with Sibel Erol's excellent introduction, is important and timely. When stereotypes of women in the Muslim world abound, Halide's Memoirs remind us of the courage and dedication of "foremothers" who struggled for emancipation at both personal and national levels. These Memoirs open a window on the search for personal expression of a woman caught up in the oppressive dynamics of her polygamous households (parental and marital), and the travails of national liberation and nation-building in Turkey, in which she played an active role. Halide speaks to us with an urgency which, if anything, now cries out to be heard more than ever. "Deniz Kandiyoti, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novelsSnowandMy Name Is Red. Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically sealed apartment building they shared. In this place came his first intimations of the melancholy awareness that binds all residents of his city together: that of living in the seat of ruined imperial glories, in a country trying to become “modern” at the dizzying crossroads of East and West. This elegiac communal spirit overhangs Pamuk’s reflections as he introduces the writers and painters (among the latter, most particularly the German Antoine-Ignace Melling) through whose eyes he came to see Istanbul. Against a background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he presents the interplay of his budding sense of place with that of his predecessors. And he charts the evolution of a rich, sometimes macabre, imaginative life, which furnished a daydreaming boy refuge from family discord and inner turmoil, and which would continue to serve the famous writer he was to become. It was, and remains, a life fed by the changing microcosm of the apartment building and, even more, the beckoning kaleidoscope beyond its walls. As much a portrait of the artist as a young man as it is an oneiric Joycean map of the city,Istanbulis a masterful evocation of its subject through the idiosyncrasies of direct experience as much as the power of myth--the dazzling book Pamuk was born to write.

A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or hüzün– that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost Ottoman Empire.

As he companionably guides us across the Bosphorus, through Istanbul's historical monuments and lost paradises, its dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, he also introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers.

Like the Dublin of Joyce and Jan Morris' Venice, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time. 'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.' A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. 'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla #65533;zkirimli, writer and literary historian

A tale of high adventure and lyrical celebration, tenderness and violence, generosity and ruthlessness, Memed, My Hawk is the defining achievement of one of the greatest and most beloved of living writers, Yashar Kemal. It is reissued here with a new introduction by the author on the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication. Memed, a high-spirited, kindhearted boy, grows up in a desperately poor mountain village whose inhabitants are kept in virtual slavery by the local landlord. Determined to escape from the life of toil and humiliation to which he has been born, he flees but is caught, tortured, and nearly killed. When at last he does get away, it is to set up as a roving brigand, celebrated in song, who could be a liberator to his people—unless, like the thistles that cover the mountain slopes of his native region, his character has taken an irremediably harsh and unforgiving form.

Translated by Richard Hamer. From a popular and innovative Turkish author, this darkly comic, irreverent and hypnotic murder mystery explores humanity's endless absurdity and its futile attempts to create perfection. A failure in his youth, the narrator wanders exotic worlds before returning to his hometown, the Motherland. Here, the inhabitants never talk about evil events, but the messenger boy murders are different: an intoxicating mystery that lures the narrator towards the city's strange characters and even stranger secrets...

Set on the eve of World War II, "A Mind at Peace" captures the anxieties of a Turkish family facing the difficult reality entrenched in the early republic, founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Poetically drawing on the effects of cultural upheaval on the individual, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar illuminates the precarious balance between tradition and modernity, East and West.Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar has been noted as the most prominant Turkish novelist of the twentieth century. Born in Istanbul, he traveled widely in Anatolia before returning to Istanbul in 1919, after the First World War, to study literature with the poet laureate Yahya Kemal. Deeply influenced by Paul ValEry and Bergson, Tanpinar created a cultural universe in his work, bringing together Western forms of writing and the sensibilities of a decadent Ottoman culture. He taught aesthetics, mythology, and literature at the University of Istanbul.Erdag GOknar is assistant professor of Turkish Studies at Duke University. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a Ph.D. in Near and Middle East Studies. He received, with Orhan Pamuk, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his English translation of Pamuk's "My Name is Red" in 2003. He is also the recipient a Fulbright fellowship and an NEA translation grant for "A Mind at Peace."

The earliest Turkish verses, dating from the sixth century A.D., were love lyrics. Since then, love has dominated the Turks' poetic modes and moodspre-Islamic, Ottoman classical, folk, modern. In style, form and sensibility, this collection offers a broad spectrum: virtually all types and varieties are represented here. The English versions are loyal to the originals and strive to be authentic poems in English. Here are lyrics from pre-Islamic Central Asia, passages from epics, mystical ecstasies of such eminent thirteenth-century figures as Rumi and Yunus Emre, classical poems of the Ottoman Empire (including Süleyman the Magnificent and women courtly poets), lilting folk poems, and the work of the legendary communist Nazim Hikmet (who is arguably Turkey's most famous poet internationally) and the greatest living Turkish poet, Fazil Hüsnü Dag larca. The verses in this collection are true to the Turkish spirit as well as universal in their appeal. They show how Turks praise and satirize love, how they see it as a poetic experience. Poetry was for many centuries the premier Turkish genre and love its predominant theme. Some of the best expressions of that happy coalescence can be found in this volume.

Tracing the lives of three generations of a Turkish family, from the Ottoman Empire to the 1990s, this winner of Turkey's most prestigious literary prize follows a daughter who journeys back to her mother's student days at Cambridge and later struggles to find a place in Ataturk's new social order.

Like a treasure-filled storehouse to which we have lost the key, Ottoman lyric poetry is almost unknown today, particularly among Western readers. Yet, during the centuries in which the Ottoman Empire was one of the world' great powers, poetry was its central medium of cultural expression. From love to the most profound search for spiritual truth to impassioned pleas for employment or largesse, everything that touched people deeply was expressed in poetry.This anthology, the first major English translation of Ottoman poetry in nearly a century, unlocks the storehouse. The authors offer free verse translations of 75 lyric poems (whose original Ottoman Turkish texts are also included), spanning a period from the fourteenth through the early twentieth centuries.In addition to the poems, the authors provide concise background information on Ottoman history and literature, informative notes to the poems, and brief biographies of the poets. These materials give students and general readers sufficient context to understand the poems, without burdening the reading experience.

Describes in chilling yet affectionate detail the disintegration of a wealthy Ottoman family in the last days of the empire.

This is the first full-length biography in English of Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet and political activist who is one of the greatest literary figures ever to emerge from Turkey. Not only a communist committed to revolution, but a romantic who was passionately in love with his country and his people, Hikmet was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and sentenced in 1938 to twenty-eight years imprisonment. Although an international campaign helped to secure his release under an amnesty in 1950, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 where he died in 1963 stripped of his Turkish citizenship. This book presents much new material, most of it Turkish and not available to most readers, and the authors have also used interviews with people who were close to Hikmet to illuminate his life. Hikmet's poetry has been skillfully integrated with his personal and political life, and photographs richly illustrate the career and life of a poet whose career forms a microcosm of twentieth-century politics.

Arriving in Istanbul as a boy, Mevlut Karataş is enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He becomes a street vendor, like his father, hoping to strike it rich, but luck never seems to be on Mevlut's side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he has seen just once, only to elope by mistake with her sister. Although he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have together, Mevlut stumbles toward middle age as everyone around him seems to be reaping the benefits of a rapidly modernizing Turkey. Told through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters, in A Strangeness in My Mind Nobel-prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk paints a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years.

YUNUS EMRE: THE TURKISH DERVISH ~SELECTED POEMS~Translation, Introduction Paul SmithYunus Emre (d. 132o) is considered one of the most important Turkish poets having a great influence on Turkish literature from his own time until today. His poems concern divine love as well as human love of the Divine as God and the Perfect Master, Beloved, Friend and human destiny and weakness. Little is known of his life other than he became a Sufi dervish Perfect Master (Qutub). A contemporary of Rumi, it is told the two great souls met: Rumi asked Yunus what he thought of his huge work, the Mesnevi. Yunus said, "Excellent! But I would have done it differently." Surprised, Rumi asked how. Yunus replied, "I'd have written, 'I came from the eternal, clothed myself in flesh, took the name Yunus.'" This illustrates his simple approach that has made him loved by many. Here is the largest selection of his poems translated into English mainly in the form of the gazel that he often used. The correct rhyme-structure has been kept as well as the beauty and meaning of these beautiful, mystical poems. Included... an Introduction on his Life & Times and the Form and History & Function of the gazel and a chapter on Sufism & Poetry, Turkish Poetry and the Turkish Language, Bibliography. Pages 237COMMENTS ON PAUL SMITH'S TRANSLATION OF HAFIZ'S 'DIVAN'."It is not a joke... the English version of ALL the ghazals of Hafiz is a great feat and of paramount importance. I am astonished. If he comes to Iran I will kiss the fingertips that wrote such a masterpiece inspired by the Creator of all." Dr. Mir Mohammad Taghavi (Dr. of Literature) Tehran. "Superb translations. 99% Hafiz 1% Paul Smith." Ali Akbar Shapurzman, translator into Persian and knower of Hafiz's Divan off by heart. "Smith has probably put together the greatest collection of literary facts and history concerning Hafiz." Daniel Ladinsky (Penguin Books author). Paul Smith is a poet, author and translator of over 80 books of Sufi poets of the Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish and other languages... including Hafiz, Sadi, Nizami, Rumi, 'Attar, Sana'i, Obeyd Zakani, Nesimi, Kabir, Anvari, Ansari, Jami, Khayyam, Rudaki, Yunus Emre, Baba Farid, Mu'in, Lalla Ded and others and his own poetry, fiction, plays, biographies, children's books, plays and screenplays.

Seventeen-year-old #65533;aglar is just another apathetic teenager-except when it comes to his sister, #65533;igdem, who he believes is the world's most beautiful and brilliant nine-year-old. Determined to display her genius, #65533;aglar grooms #65533;igdem's talent into a perfect Michael Jackson impersonation and pursues a sure route to fame: YouTube. Tragically, #65533;aglar's efforts are sabotaged by a little incident internationally known as the Taksim riots. Now it seems that everyone's too busy watching the people's uprising unfold to click on #65533;igdem's video. That leaves #65533;aglar only one recourse: he will have to use the riots to his advantage. After all, who wouldn't want to watch a child doing the moonwalk against the backdrop of political unrest? But as #65533;aglar strives to showcase his sister, he finds himself pulled into the heart of the uprising and discovers that he may just have talent of his own. From bestselling author Emrah Serbes comes a hilarious, poignant story of a teen's struggle to find his place and launch his sister's star amid Turkey's real-life fight for freedom.

The 201 most commonly used Turkish verbs are transliterated into the Roman alphabet and presented one to a page.

From one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and outspoken writers, a novel about the tangled histories of two families In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya’s mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres. Full of vigorous, unforgettable female characters, The Bastard of Istanbulis a bold, powerful tale that will confirm Shafak as a rising star of international fiction.

Nazim Hikmet's poetry combines passion and simplicity with sophistication, producing work of enduring significance. He was both a superb narrative and lyric poet; his immense and continuing popularity in Turkey testifies to his common touch. This extensive selection ranges from his epic poem 'Sheikh Bedreddin' to the moving prison poems addressed to his wife. The book is introduced by the leading expert on Turkish literature, Tal#65533;t Sait Halman, former Professor of Turkish Literature at Princeton and New York Universities and currently at Bilkent University, Ankara.   N#65533;zim Hikmet (1902-63), Turkey's greatest modern poet, was a political prisoner in Turkey for more than fourteen years and spent the last thirteen years of his life in exile, mainly in Russia, travelling widely through Europe and further afield.   Ruth Christie was born and educated in Scotland. She studied Turkish at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She has taught English literature and has been translating novels, short stories and poetry from the Turkish for many years.   Richard McKane is a poet and the translator of Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova' and, with Elizabeth McKane, of Mandelstam's The Moscow Notebooks' and The Voronezh Notebooks'. Anvil has published The Pillar of Fire', his selection from the poetry of Nikolay Gumilyov.   Ruth Christie and Richard McKane have jointly translated the Turkish poet Oktay Rifat's selected poems, Voices of Memory'.

Orga journeys to the center of Turkey to stay with the Yuruk nomads in the High Taurus Mountains, learning their lore and legends in a world untouched by politics or the march of events.

"An enchanting combination of compassion and cruelty . . . Elif Shafak is the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade."-Orhan Pamuk The setting is a stately residence in Istanbul, built by Russian noble emigre Pavel Antipov for his wife Agripina at the end of the Tsarist reign-now sadly dilapidated, flea-infested and home to ten families. Shafak uses the structure of A Thousand and One Nights to construct a story-within-a-story narrative. Elif Shafak is an outstanding name amongst young Turkish authors. She has written four novels and won the Mevlana Prize for the best work in mystical and transcendental literature. She is in the middle of a residency at the Massachusetts Five College Program in women's studies and resides in Mount Holyoke, USA.

"When I stayed at the farm over the weekends, Zelha´s grandfather used to gather his grandchilderen and myself around him regaling us the stories but the embellişshed them with appropriate folk songs. We girls preferred the stories involving love and the boys liked the war epics. These incredible unknown details would explain why the Kurds and the Turks both stayed together and confronted esch other."

A phenomenon in Turkey with more than 120,000 copies sold, Women who Blow on Knots chronicles a voyage reaching from Tunisia to Lebanon, taken by three young women and septuagenarian Madam Lilla. Although the three young women embark on the road for different reasons - for each holds a dark secret - it is only at the journey's point of no return that Lilla's own murderous motivations for the trip become clear... Unique and controversial in its country of origin for its political rhetoric and strong, atypically Muslim female characters, Temelkuran weaves an empowering tale.

Müştak Serhazin, last scion of the Serhazin clan. A man who has been waiting for years for one woman, his life wasted on one grandiose love. On his love for an ambitious, indomitable woman who has dedicated her life to the study of Ottoman history... A professor with an outstanding career, one studded with triumphs and achievements, found dead, stabbed with a letter-opener featuring an engraving of the seal of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror... Is it a crime of passion or a murder with roots that stretch back to the suspicious death of the great Sultan Mehmed himself? An epic journey back in time to the heady days of victory and betrayal when the Ottoman state became a global empire. And an ancient question haunting us throughout this exhilarating journey: is history the events of the past or is it what the historians tell us? Sultan Mehmed Han. Mehmed Han, son of Murad Han, son of Mehmed Han I. Lord of the two lands and the two seas, shadow of God on Earth, natural successor to the Roman Empire, the emperor who conquered Constantinople. And a man with a burning desire to create a completely new nation, embracing peoples of different faiths, languages and creeds. An army galloping across vast plains and the sound of swords, battle cries and shrieks of terror. Cities falling, castles captured and states crumbling into ruin one after the other. A ruler whose name was known throughout the known world by the age of forty-nine. And the eternal, unchanging hand of destiny, as day fades into night and man passes away into the next world. The suspicious death of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and a state and a palace torn asunder as, unbeknownst to the people, the two princes vie for the throne. And, as the bloody battle rages on, in a forgotten chamber of the royal palace lies the lifeless body of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror...

'Altun offers us three delights for the price of one: a brilliantly edgy, witty thriller that rivals Highsmith; a metaphysical puzzle that Borges would be proud to call his own; and a tale of two assassins that conveys, better than any other novel I have read, the way that money talks in Istanbul.' - Maureen Freely "A deft, zinging whodunnit which is also a metaphysical puzzle worthy of the Oulipo group. Altun's prose has a dreamlike urgency; his novel is a major achievement." - John Ashbery After the death of his overbearing mother, the privileged Arda reclines in his wealth, reflecting on his young life and on the life of his father, the famous mathematician Muersel Ergenekon, who was murdered on Arda's fourteenth birthday. While on the other side of the city, 'your humble servant' Bedirhan has decided to pack in his ten-year career as an assassin. Their two lives become intrinsically bound in this remarkable thriller that takes us through the streets of Istanbul. We learn that Bedirhan in fact killed Arda's father, and that they share more in common than he or we could imagine. Meanwhile, Selcuk Altun, a former family friend, is playing a deadly game, providing Arda with clues to track down his father's killer. Selcuk Altun was born in Artvin, Turkey, in 1950. He lives in Istanbul, andSongs My Mother Never Taught Me is his fourth novel to be published in Turkish. He is a retired banking executive and a bibliophile.

From the universally acclaimed author of "Snow" and "My Name Is Red" comes his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize. A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and the strange allure of collecting, this is Pamuk's greatest achievement to date.

From one of the most important and acclaimed writers at work today, a thrilling new novel—part murder mystery, part love story—set amid the perils of religious repression in sixteenth-century Istanbul. When the Sultan commissions a great book to celebrate his royal self and his extensive dominion, he directs Enishte Effendi to assemble a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed, and no one in the elite circle can know the full scope or nature of the project. Panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears, and the Sultan demands answers within three days. The only clue to the mystery—or crime?—lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Has an avenging angel discovered the blasphemous work? Or is a jealous contender for the hand of Enishte’s ravishing daughter, the incomparable Shekure, somehow to blame? Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is at once a fantasy and a philosophical puzzle, a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex, and power.

Osman is a young university student whose life is changed by a chance encounter with a mysterious book. Osman becomes obsessed with the book, which seems to contain all the magic and power of life and love. Romantic and elusive, The New Life is a rhapsody to love and an investigation into the shadowy nature of self.

Orhan Pamuk’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize,Other Colorsis a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers. Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, and meditative—the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing. By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative,Other Colorsglows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.

Follows the adventures of three young Turks loose in America as they negotiate their desires in a land that seems to allow limitless indulgences.

Sait Faik may well be named "the Turkish Chekhov." In Turkey, critics and readers regard him as their finest short story writer. Since his death in 1954 at the age of forty-eight, his stature has grown on the strength of his narrative art, which is both realistic and whimsical with a poetic touch. Süha Oguzertem, a premier authority on Turkish fiction, writes in his introduction to Sleeping in the Forest that "As an anti-bourgeois writer and fierce democrat, Sait Faik has always sided with the underdog" and that no characters remain " 'common' or 'ordinary' once they enter Sait Faik's stories; his piercing gaze and thoughtful vision transform them lovingly into unique beings." Sait Faik's fiction ranges from the realistic to the surrealistic, from the romantic to the modern, from the cynical to the compassionate. With virtuosic skill, he captures the spirit and the spleen of the city of Istanbul and its environs. In evoking the mystery of that great metropolis through such ordinary characters as Armenian fishermen, Greek Orthodox priests, and the disillusioned and disfranchised, he creates for us a marvelous microcosm of tragicomedy. Few writers, in Turkey or elsewhere, command Sait Faik's mastery of the ironic. Sleeping in the Forest features twenty-two stories, an excerpt from a novella, and fifteen poems rendered into English by some of the best-known translators of Turkish literature. Sait Faik's chiaroscuro world is brought into focus by an introductory essay on utopian poetics and lyrical stylistics of this great Turkish writer. The book is a stimulating exploration into Turkish mood and milieu.

A charmingly illustrated collection of old Turkish tales.

Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal is an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. Memed—introduced in Kemal’s legendary first novel, Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his books—is one of the few truly mythic figures of modern fiction, a desperado and sometime defender of the oppressed who is condemned to wander in the blood-soaked gray zone between justice and the law. In They Burn the Thistles, one of the finest of Kemal’s novels, Memed is on the run. Hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit’s end, he has lost faith in himself and has retreated to ponder the vanity of human wishes. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful stallion, itself a hunted creature, serves to restore his determination and rouse him to action.

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja--"master"--a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.

The first large empire in the heart of Anatolia: The Hittite country... The greed of ambitious kings for land. A history written in blood. Kadesh, the first great war in history. A hopeless longing. A young woman who experiences love as a sin. People cursed by Gods. A man who pays for his curse through war. A cruel world, two people whose love takes refuge in a rambling castle...A scream coming from many years ago... A cry against war.Welcome, oh traveler of far away roads, bearer of good tidings, you who carries the fatigue of wisdom on your shoulders, and the excitement of the unknown in your eyes, welcome to my old country, to the lands of the Hattians with its thousand Gods, to beautiful Hattusha...Welcome to happiness fallen ill, to long-lived sorrow, to the lament that you will bring to an end. Welcome to orphaned streets, empty squares, to my poor home. I've been expecting you, for long nights and long days, for cheerful springs, saturated summers, tired autumns, and scorched winters, for many, many long years.