Essays

Our Great Contrarian: On Turkish Humor Writer Aziz Nesin

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The torching of the hotel was seen as a violent reaction to Nesin's marginal publishing activities -- at least this was what we were instructed to think by the Turkish media. From the flames that covered the facade of the hotel, Nesin had emerged rather miraculously, like some kind of supernatural figure.
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Reviews

The Heart of My Life, the Life of My Heart

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Not all books can make us cry and those that do are often so shamefully sentimental that we can’t easily admit to reading them, let alone crying with them. This, however, is not the case with Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, a novella-length text in three chapters, which produces in its reader tears of the most literary kind.
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In Person

My Little Library in Anatolia

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Although the books were old and deep in hibernation, the people who came to read them were very much alive. So in my small library in a distant Anatolian town I learned an awful lot about what young Turkish men enjoyed reading under the gun. I watched them as they read for relief. I watched them as they read for pleasure. I watched them as they read for keeping sane.
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