I’m the author of four books: The Lion and the Nightingale, Under the Shadow, An Istanbul Anthology, and Macera. The Economist called Under the Shadow a ‘refreshingly balanced’ book whose author ‘has announced himself as a voice to be listened to’. The Times Literary Supplement praised the way The Lion and the Nightingale ‘grounds Turkish current affairs in the context of the past couple of decades and explains the attraction of extreme politics to the country’s youth’. I contributed to the world’s leading journals and newspapers, including two front-page stories in The New York Times, cover stories in The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and The Times Literary Supplement.
I wrote...
The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey
In 2017 novelist and essayist Kaya Genç travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attacked Istanbul, and journalists and teachers were imprisoned, he walked the streets of the famous Ottoman neighbourhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who lived among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations.
The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale. Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview, and his own autobiography, Genç takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.
Paranoia, hatred of the Other, animosity toward all intellectuals, minorities, and dissidents — these sentiments spread like a disease in Turkey over 2017. In Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year the plague spreads with similar ruthlessness while the eyewitness account provides an anchor for readers. It’s an intense, focused, and yet detached chronicle. Defoe’s book was my template while writing The Lion and the Nightingale.
The haunting cry of "Bring out your dead!" by a bell-ringing collector of 17th-century plague victims has filled readers across the centuries with cold terror. The chilling cry survives in historical consciousness largely as a result of this classic 1722 account of the epidemic of bubonic plague — known as the Black Death — that ravaged England in 1664–1665. Actually written nearly 60 years later by Daniel Defoe, the Journal is narrated by a Londoner named "H. F.," who allegedly lived through the devastating effects of the pestilence and produced this eye witness account. Drawing on his considerable talents as…
An episode in this magisterial book returned to me while writing The Lion and the Nightingale in late 2017. John Gregory Dunne, her husband of thirty-nine years, has died from a heart attack on December 30, 2003, and Joan Didion recalls refusing to give away his shoes, in the sad hope that he might return. The precision of Didion’s language, her analysis of grief, and navigation of uncharted territories after a great loss, inspired me. Sensible people in Turkey also fantasised about a return of their liberties in a year of ceaseless oppression. They had lost things dear to them: human rights, dignity, joy. By remaining muted they hoped to retrieve them. It didn’t work.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were just…
The year is 2000. Our narrator has lost her parents in her senior year to cancer and suicide. All she wants is to sleep. Her apathetic state is familiar to Turkey’s citizens. Throughout 2017, similar sentiments—resentment, cynicism, inaction—defined our psyche. Moshfegh‘s year ends with a terror attack. Ours started with one.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible
A New York Times Bestseller
"One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." - Entertainment Weekly
"Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh's] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." -Vogue
Set during Moscow Show Trials in 1938, this chilling novel by Arthur Koestler chronicles the purging of intellectuals and politicians in the Communist Party. Stalin used these trials to strengthen his one-man role, setting a pattern for future autocrats.
The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler’s modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon—the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule—is now restored and in a completely new translation.
Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic.
In print continually since 1940, Darkness at Noon has been translated into over 30 languages and is both a stirring novel and a classic anti-fascist text. What makes its popularity and tenacity even more remarkable is that all existing versions of Darkness at Noon are…
2011 was the most violent year in Norway’s history. A bomb, detonated in central Oslo, killed eight people; a massacre on the island of Utøya a few hours later killed sixty-nine more. This book tells that day’s horrors by interweaving sociology, history, and psychology, looking at the weeks and months that surrounded the tragedy. One of Us was an inspiration behind the opening chapter of The Lion and the Nightingale where I tried to recreate the movements of the mass murderer during the Reina nightclub attack on January 1, 2017.
On 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 of his fellow Norwegians in a terrorist atrocity that shocked the world. Many were teenagers, just beginning their adult lives. In the devastating aftermath, the inevitable questions began. How could this happen? Why did it happen? And who was Anders Breivik? Asne Seierstad was uniquely placed to explore these questions. An award-winning foreign correspondent, she had spent years writing about people caught up in violent conflict. Now, for the first time, she was being asked to write about her home country. Based on extensive testimonies and interviews, One of Us is…
Transforming Pandora, women's fiction with a metaphysical undercurrent, is written with humour and a light touch. As the plot slips between two time frames, separated by more than thirty years, the reader explores her life and loves: her ups and downs.
In the opening chapter, Pandora is attempting to come to terms with her husband's death. At a friend's suggestion, she reluctantly attends an evening of clairvoyance, after which her life is transformed by a mysterious spirit who sets her on a new path.
Her romantic life is reignited when she encounters a new man, but complicated by the appearance of a significant figure from her past. At the same time her spiritual life is presented with a challenge when she's offered the chance of enlightenment via a heavenly correspondence course. Her quest in life to find her true purpose is within her reach. Will she grasp this opportunity? Or will she choose love over light?
Pandora, 51, childless, and still beautiful, is attempting to come to terms with her husband's death. Having a history of being drawn to the esoteric, yet remaining a healthy sceptic, she reluctantly attends an evening of clairvoyance and raises a spirit who sets her on a new path...
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