Turkey is regularly "making headlines" since the recent attempted failed coup of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime in 2016.Author Asli Erdogan's was one of many journalists and writers imprisoned shortly thereafter on "terrorism charges," based on her vocal critique of Erdogan's regime.Her arrest has made international news being reported on in the New York Times, the Guardian UK, and elsewhere. PEN America advocates on her behalf. (Sales kit will contain articles)Stories about trauma, confinement and incarceration reflect Asli's previous experiences and personal knowledge of imprisonment and exile. Writers confronting and challenging oppressive regimes are paying with their lives, and they deserve our attention. Publishing this book at a time when Asli Erdogan is facing life imprisonment helps to shine light on her situation and that of other writers and journalists in similar situations.City Lights continues our commitment to publishing quality literature in translation from Turkey. Previous books and writers we've published include "Motherland Hotel" by Yusuf Atilgan, and "Death in Troy" and "A Long Day's Evening" by Bilge Karasu, two of Turkey's premier modernists.

This collection of new essays brings together scholarly examinations of a writer who -- despite the prestige that the Nobel Prize has earned him -- remains controversial with respect to his place in the literary tradition of his home country. This is in part because the positioning of Turkey itself in relation to the cultural divide between East and West has been the subject of a debate going back to the beginnings of the modern Turkish state and earlier. The present essays, written mostly by literary scholars, range widely across Pamuks novelistic oeuvre, dealing with how the writer, often adding an allegorical level to the personages depicted in his experimental narratives, portrays tensions such as those between Western secularism and traditional Islam and different conceptions of national identity.