Turkish Archives - BookDragon

Disquiet by Zülfü Livaneli, translated by Brendan Freely [in Shelf Awareness]

08 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, Translation, Turkish

Former UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli's startling Disquiet requires multi-layered engagement: to appreciate it as a penetrating novel about a Turkish family confronting murder and to acknowledge it as intense sociopolitical testimony of contemporary, too-little-known, ISIL-led (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) genocide of the...

Red Dress in Black and White by Elliot Ackerman [in Shelf Awareness]

10 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Turkish

*STARRED REVIEW At the center of 2017 National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman’s formidable Red Dress in Black and White is William, "about seven years old," whose relationship to parents, place, and history is brilliantly revealed over a single day. William is the son of Catherine,...

Beside Myself by Sasha Marianna Salzmann, translated by Imogen Taylor [in Library Journal]

04 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, European, Fiction, Repost, Translation, Turkish

Be forewarned: identity, nationality, and gender are all fluid here – histories intertwine and conflict, narrators change and prove unreliable, and pronouns are a challenge throughout. “I don’t know where we’re going,” the first sentence reveals, setting up a story already fully in motion. Ali...

I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer by Ahmet Altan, translated by Yasemin Çongar [in Booklist]

11 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation, Turkish, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW For “speaking a few innocuous words on a television program in the aftermath of the failed 2016 “coup” against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Altan was sentenced to life imprisonment, recounts his friend and lawyer Philippe Sands in his foreword to this book....

13 Fall Faves, Speed-Dating Style [in The Booklist Reader]

03 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Black/African American, Caribbean American, Cuban, Cuban American, Fiction, Indian American, Iranian, Iranian American, Japanese, Korean, Latina/o/x, Lists, Memoir, Nonfiction, Persian American, Repost, Short Stories, South Asian, South Asian American, Translation, Turkish, Vietnamese American, Young Adult Readers

Oh, good gracious! I can’t stand it: soooo many amazing books and my aging eyeballs just can’t keep up! Last week at ALA Annual, I got to “Read ‘n’ Rave,” but I had such an embarrassingly overflowing list, the buzzer went off (uh-oh!), and I couldn’t...

Graphic Gems: Novels, Biographies, and Memoirs for Younger Readers [in The Booklist Reader]

05 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Chinese American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Japanese American, Lists, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Russian, Russian American, Translation, Turkish, Turkish American, Young Adult Readers

Since I recently shared some utterly satisfying single-volume graphic titles for adults, I figured I should point out a few outstanding titles for middle-grade and YA readers, as well. That said, so-called grown-ups will surely find many of these titles just as satisfying. Equal literary...

Discover WeNeedDiverseBooks with Özge Samanci’s Dare to Disappoint

29 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Turkish, WeNeedDiverseBooks, WNDB.SummerReadingSeries2016, Young Adult Readers

Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey by Özge Samanci

19 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Turkish, Young Adult Readers

At age 6, Özge Samanci was desperate to be "on the other side of the binoculars" – that is, to be at school, being watched by her mother from across the street, just as she and her mother occasionally spotted and waved at her older sister Pelin,...

Dance of the Banished by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

26 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Canadian, Central Asian, Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Turkish, Young Adult Readers

The year is 1913. Zeynep and Ali are teenage lovers in Anatolia (once Asia Minor, now modern Turkey) who part with a lingering sense of bitterness: Ali's impending departure breaks their promise of escaping their village together. Feeling betrayed, Zeynep turns away: "I refuse to be your...

Orhan’s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian [in Christian Science Monitor]

09 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Armenian American, Fiction, Repost, Turkish

Orhan's Inheritance cleverly intertwines first love, ancient betrayal, secrets, and war crimes At age 8, Aline Ohanesian’s great-grandmother interrupted her seventh viewing of The Sound of Music with a promise: “I have a story, too.” That was the first and last time Ohanesian heard about her Nene’s...

Discover WeNeedDiverseBooks with The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Real Princesses

18 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Biography, Children/Picture Books, Chinese American, Egyptian, European, Indian, Middle Grade Readers, Mongolian, Nonfiction, Persian, Turkish, WeNeedDiverseBooks, WNDB.SummerReadingSeries2014

Nasreddine by Odile Weulersse, illustrated by Rébecca Dautremer

21 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Children/Picture Books, European, Fiction, Translation, Turkish

Here's the perfect companion to Mar Pavón and Nívola Uyá's A Very, Very Noisy Tractor which posted Saturday. Young Nasreddine's answers his father Mustafa's request to ready the donkey for their journey to the market. Mustafa and their large sack of dates sit atop the donkey, while a...

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar

18 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Repost, Translation, Turkish

Mixed in with the many death-and-destruction titles I've been reading the last few months, my most recent choices inadvertently seem to have an added layer of death-and-destruction-in-the-name-of-God. Too many books, regardless of genre or target audience, seem to offer irrefutable proof that the rules and...

Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely

12 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Translation, Turkish

In spite of its heft (500+ pages, or 20.5 hours if you let the perfectly-paced John Lee read to you), not much really happens in The Museum of Innocence. I'm adding here the requisite spoiler alert, but I'm fairly certain that most readers will guess the outcome...

Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely

26 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Translation, Turkish

Here are the two most important things I got out of Snow: 1. it definitely had memorable glimpses of Turkish social and cultural history that I had little to no knowledge of previously; 2. Orhan Pamuk is a clever, intelligent writer, which – given his array...

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

21 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, British, European, Fiction, South Asian, Turkish

To reduce this rich, complicated, multi-layered story into a few sentences seems almost disrespectful ...

The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Real Princesses by Shirin Yim Bridges, illustrated by Albert Nguyen

21 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Biography, Children/Picture Books, Chinese American, Egyptian, European, Indian, Middle Grade Readers, Mongolian, Persian, Turkish

Hatshepsut of Egypt Artemisia of Caria Sorghaghtani of Mongolia Qutlugh Terkan Khatun of Kirman Isabella of Castile Nur Jahan of India Happy birthday to the world's most famous queen (still!) who turns 85 today, making her son the oldest prince-waiting-to-be-king in British history. Next week, on April 29, Queen E2 will...

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

28 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Armenian American, Audio, Fiction, Turkish

Even before this book hit U.S. shelves, French-born Turkish author Elif Shafak was charged with insulting "Turkishness" in violation of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code because one of her characters refers to the large-scale massacre of Armenians that began in 1915 in Turkey as...

The Silence of God and Other Plays by Catherine Filloux

23 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Cambodian, Drama/Theater, Jewish, Nonethnic-specific, Southeast Asian, Turkish

Playwright Catherine (pronounced Ka-treen) Filloux has built her dramatic reputation on giving voice to lost, overlooked souls. In Lemkin's House, Filloux presents the struggle of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish American lawyer whom she refers to as her "historical soulmate," a man who coined the term "genocide"...

Leyla: The Black Tulip by Aleve Lytle Croutier [in AsianWeek]

26 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, Turkish

Leyla, The Black Tulip One of the three newest additions to the Girls of Many Lands series [click here for an article about the series debut] from Pleasant Company (famous for its...

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