Maureen Freely

A luminous essay collection about loneliness, contentment, and the books and cities that have shaped the experience of a Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red.
"One of the essential writers that both East and West can gratefully claim as their own.” —The New York Times Book Review

In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing...

It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Fusun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Thus begins an obsessive but tragic love affair that will transform itself into a compulsive collection of objects--a museum of one man's broken heart--that chronicle Kemal's lovelorn progress and his afflicted...

A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost man of letters. Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood, his first intimations of the melancholy awareness...

"The narrator of Tezer Özlü's novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love. Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman's...

" A literary discovery: an uproarious tragicomedy of modernization, in its first-ever English translation. Perhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, The Time Regulation Institute is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state. At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with...

"Set in 1926 when the value of money plummeted to its lowest, this rediscovered classic from a pioneering Turkish author tells the story of a forbidden love and its consequences. When was it that Celile became aware of those feelings that gripped her heart; the distressing feelings that filled her heart, causing it to overflow? She had no idea. Suddenly there was someone bringing both pain and joy to her life. Celile plunges into this fire that will...