Book picks similar to
In Jail with Nazim Hikmet by Orhan Kemal


türk-edebiyatı
turkey
turkish-literature
turkish

Other Colors: Essays and A Story


Orhan Pamuk - 1999
    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 Colors glows 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.

Serenad


Zülfü Livaneli - 2011
    Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is tasked with looking after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university's invitation. Although he is distant at first, Maya gradually learns of the tragic circumstances that brought him to Istanbul sixty years before, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him. Inspired by the 1942 Struma disaster, in which nearly 800 Jewish refugees perished after the ship carrying them to Palestine was torpedoed off the coast of Turkey, Serenade for Nadia is both a poignant love story and a gripping testament to the power of human connection in crisis.

Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse


Nâzım Hikmet - 1938
    This 17,000-line verse-novel is made up of a traveler's vivid encounters with Turkish men and women from all walks of life. In colloquial language, Hikmet stages their private hopes and griefs, and through these many human dramas, he documents Turkey's historic transformation into a secular republic. Human Landscapes from My Country is "lively . . . cinematographic . . . [able] to capture the least scholarly reader" (Denise Levertov).Human Landscapes from My Country was published in a abridged English-language version by Persea Books twenty years ago. This new edition marks a major event in contemporary world literature.

The Book of Dede Korkut


Anonymous
    The stories are peopled by characters as bizarre as they are unforgettable: Crazy Karchar, whose unpredictability requires an army of fleas to manage it; Kazan, who cheerfully pretends to necrophilia in order to escape from prison; the monster Goggle-eye; and the heroine Chichek, who shoots, races on horseback and wrestles her lover. Geoffrey Lewis's classic translation retains the odd and oddly appealing style of the stories, with their mixture of the colloquial, the poetic and the dignified, and magnificently conveys the way in which they bring to life a wild society and its inhabitants. This edition also includes an introduction, a map and explanatory notes.

Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within


Elif Shafak - 2007
     After the birth of her first child in 2006, Turkish writer Elif Shafek suffered from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. Infused with guilt, anxiety, and bewilderment about whether she could ever be a good mother, Shafak stopped writing and lost her faith in words altogether. In this elegantly written memoir, she retraces her journey from free-spirited, nomadic artist to dedicated but emotionally wrought mother. Identifying a constantly bickering harem of women who live inside of her, each with her own characteristics--the cynical intellectual, the goal-oriented go-getter, the practical-rational, the spiritual, the maternal, and the lustful--she craves harmony, or at least a unifying identity. As she intersperses her own experience with the lives of prominent authors such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Ayn Rand, and Zelda Fitzgerald, Shafak looks for a solution to the inherent conflict between artistic creation and responsible parenting. With searing emotional honesty and an incisive examination of cultural mores within patriarchal societies, Shafak has rendered an important work about literature, motherhood, and spiritual well-being.

Summer's End


Adalet Ağaoğlu - 1981
    Translated from the Turkish by Figen Bingul with Ilkan Taskin, Zoe English and Edward Foster. Includes an introduction by Sibel Erol. Narrated by an author on vacation among the classical ruils of the ancient city of Side on the Mediterannean coast in Turkey, SUMMER'S END provides an intricate picture of a large cross-section of modern Turkish society. The novel offers a complex multi-dimensional and multi-leveled view of cultural values, politics, sexuality, and personal dilemmas. SUMMER'S END is one of the most celebrated works by Adalet Angaoglu, widely considered to be one of the principal novelists of our time. SUMMER'S END, says critic Sibel Erol in her introduction, "is an elegaic novel of attempted reconciliation and consolation set in a lush and delectable setting that intensifies the heartbreaking contrast between life and death and society's fragmentation and nature's organic unity." Adalet Agaoglu is the author of eight novels as well as plays, memoirs, four collections of short stories, and six collections of essays. Her books have been widely translated. SUMMER'S END is the second to appear in English. She lives in Istanbul.

The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases


Gary Small - 2010
    Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New MindA psychiatrist’s stories of his most bizarre cases, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head by Gary Small, M.D., and Gigi Vorgan—co-authors of The Memory Bible—offers a fascinating and highly entertaining look into the peculiarities of the human mind. In the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and the other bestselling works of Oliver Sacks, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head surprises, enthralls, and illuminates as it focuses on medical mysteries that would stump and amaze the brilliant brains on House, M.D.

Kutadgu Bilig


Yusuf Has Hacib
    Translated, the title means something like "The Wisdom which brings Happiness" or "The Wisdom that Conduces to Royal Glory or Fortune", but has been translated more concisely as "Wisdom Which Brings Good Fortune". The text reflects the author's and his society's beliefs, feelings, and practices with regard to quite a few topics, and depicts interesting facets of various aspects of life in the Karakhanid empire. While not produced in Turkey, and more accurately referred to as Turkic literature, the Kutadgu Bilig is often considered to belong to the body of Turkish literature.

Out of the Way! Socialism's Coming!/Sosyalizm Geliyor Savulun


Aziz Nesin - 1965
    This ground-breaking series of bilingual Turkish-English books look at Turkish life from key angles--the familial, the social, and the political.

Istanbul Istanbul


Burhan Sönmez - 2015
    When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humor, to pass the time. Quiet laughter is the prisoners’ balm, delivered through parables and riddles. Gradually, the underground narrative turns into a narrative of the above-ground. Initially centered around people, the book comes to focus on the city itself. And we discover there is as much suffering and hope in the Istanbul above ground as there is in the cells underground.Despite its apparently bleak setting, this is a novel about creation, compassion, and the ultimate triumph of the imagination.

The Right to Be Lazy


Paul Lafargue - 1880
    It was not only extremely popular but also brought about pragmatic results, inspiring the movement for the eight-hour day and equal pay for men and women who perform equal work. It survives as one of the very few pieces of writing to come out of the international socialist movement of the nineteenth century that is not only readable-even enjoyable-but pertinent. This new translation by Len Bracken, fuller than previous versions in English, is supplemented by Lafargue's little-known talk on The Intellectuals.

Perking the Pansies - Jack and Liam move to Turkey


Jack Scott - 2011
    Join the culture-curious gay couple on their bumpy rite of passage in a Muslim country. Meet the oddballs, VOMITs, vetpats, emigreys, semigreys, debauched waiters and middle England miseries.When bigotry and ignorance emerge from the crude underbelly of Turkey's expat life, Jack and Liam waver. Determined to stay the course, the happy hedonistas hitch up their skirts, move to the heart of liberal Bodrum and fall in love with their intoxicating foster land. Enter Jack's irreverent world for a right royal dose of misery and joy, bigotry and enlightenment, betrayal and loyalty, friendship, love, earthquakes, birth, adoption and a senseless murder. Perking the Pansies will make you laugh out loud one minute and sob into your crumpled tissue the next."Scott pulls no punches. A good read and hopefully the first of many by new boy on the block." Jane Akatay, journalist"An insightful tale of life abroad - with a twist - from the pen of a serial people watcher. Expat Jack lays his characters bare along with his heart and soul, ''Kym Ciftci, On the Ege Magazine, Ontheege.com"Jack and Liam bring a certain je ne sais quoi to the souks and heap a plate of dry British wit to their Ottoman misadventures,"Charles Ayres, author, Impossibly Glamorous Impossiblyglamorous.com..". hilarious, saucy, witty, heartwarming and incredibly moving, Perking the Pansies is chock full of odd characters and odder situations. Jack Scott has a way with words and proves that it is the relationships we surround ourselves with that matter most,"Linda A Janssens, Writer and Co-Author, Turning Points, Adventuresinexpatland.com

Armenian Golgotha


Grigoris Balakian - 2009
    It was the beginning of the Ottoman Turkish government’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey; it was a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, by which time more than a million Armenians had been annihilated and expunged from their historic homeland. For Grigoris Balakian, himself condemned, it was also the beginning of a four-year ordeal during which he would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood.Balakian sees his countrymen sent in carts, on donkeys, or on foot to face certain death in the desert of northern Syria. Many would not even survive the journey, suffering starvation, disease, mutilation, and rape, among other tortures, before being slaughtered en route. In these pages, he brings to life the words and deeds of survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the massacre process, and also of those few brave, righteous Turks, who, with some of their German allies working for the Baghdad Railway, resisted orders calling for the death of the Armenians. Miraculously, Balakian manages to escape, and his flight—through forest and over mountain, in disguise as a railroad worker and then as a German soldier—is a suspenseful, harrowing odyssey that makes possible his singular testimony.Full of shrewd insights into the political, historical, and cultural context of the Armenian genocide—the template for the subsequent mass killings that have cast a shadow across the twentieth century and beyond—this memoir is destined to become a classic of survivor literature. Armenian Golgotha is sure to deepen our understanding of a catastrophic crime that the Turkish government, the Ottomans’ successor, denies to this day.

Secret Lives of Great Authors


Robert Schnakenberg - 2008
       With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What’s the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women?and men?did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school!

Dawn: Stories


Selahattin Demirtaş - 2017
    A cleaning lady is caught up in a violent demonstration on her way to work. A five-year-old girl attempts to escape war-torn Syria with her mother by boat. A suicide bombing shatters a neighborhood in Aleppo. And in the powerful story, 'Seher', a young factory worker is robbed of her dreams in an unimaginable act of violence.Written with Demirtaş’s signature wit, warmth, and humor, and alive with the rhythms of everyday speech, DAWN paints a remarkable portrait of life behind the headlines in Turkey and the Middle East – in all its hardship and adversity, freedom and hope.