‘Hello, sir. Do you recognize me?’
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‘"Hello, sir. Do you recognize me?" "No, I'm afraid I don't."’
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of ten novels and the memoir Istanbul. One of Europe’s most prominent novelists, his work has been translated into over sixty languages. Pamuk’s novels are most frequently set in Istanbul – where the author was born and where he still lives – a bustling, vibrant, hybrid city, poised sometimes uncomfortably between Europe and the Middle East, history and modernity, Western-style liberalism and Islamic conservatism, adaptation and tradition. His fiction, much of which explores the fluidity of identity, is heavily influenced by both Western and Arabic literature. At once a local and a global writer, he has an enormous international readership.
Photograph © Hakan Ezilmez
Maureen Freely was born in New Jersey and grew up in Istanbul. She is the author of five novels and three works of non-fiction. Her translations of Orhan Pamuk’s novels Snow and The Black Book, and of his memoir, Istanbul, are published by Faber. She lectures at the University of Warwick and lives in Bath.
More about the translator →‘In the part of the world where I come from, Europe is not just an ideal and a beautiful dream’ Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.
‘Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence.’
‘For the last thirty years I've been keeping track of the ships that sail through the Bosporus.’
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
‘There are novels which have an almost uncanny power to renew themselves in the reader’s imagination.’
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