A Useless Man: Selected Stories
Feb 2015 · Archipelago
5.0star
1 reviewreport
Ebook
240
Pages
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About this ebook
With all the wit and brilliance of Chekhov, a distinctive collection of lyrical stories from Sait Faik Abasıyanık, “Turkey’s greatest short story writer” (The Guardian)
Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s fiction traces the interior lives of strangers in his native Istanbul: ancient coffeehouse proprietors, priests, dream-addled fishermen, poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. The stories in A Useless Man are shaped by Sait Faik’s political autobiography – his resistance to social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the ethnic cleansing of his city – as he conjures the varied textures of life in Istanbul and its surrounding islands. The calm surface of these stories might seem to signal deference to the new Republic’s restrictions on language and culture, but Abasıyanık’s prose is crafted deceptively, with dark, subversive undercurrents. “Reading these stories by Sait Faik feels like finding the secret doors inside of poems,” Rivka Galchen wrote. Beautifully translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, A Useless Man is the most comprehensive collection of Sait Faik’s stories in English to date.
Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s fiction traces the interior lives of strangers in his native Istanbul: ancient coffeehouse proprietors, priests, dream-addled fishermen, poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. The stories in A Useless Man are shaped by Sait Faik’s political autobiography – his resistance to social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the ethnic cleansing of his city – as he conjures the varied textures of life in Istanbul and its surrounding islands. The calm surface of these stories might seem to signal deference to the new Republic’s restrictions on language and culture, but Abasıyanık’s prose is crafted deceptively, with dark, subversive undercurrents. “Reading these stories by Sait Faik feels like finding the secret doors inside of poems,” Rivka Galchen wrote. Beautifully translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, A Useless Man is the most comprehensive collection of Sait Faik’s stories in English to date.
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5.0
1 review
About the author
Sait Faik’s career marked a pivotal moment in Turkish culture in the 1930s and 40s when the secular, post-Ottoman sensibility placed new demands on the writing of literature. Born in Adapazari in 1906, Sait Faik is regarded by Turkish critics and readers as their finest short story writer – a Turkish Chekhov.
Alex Dawe has translated Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute, for which he won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the former president of English PEN. The translator of books by Orhan Pamuk and Fethiye Cetin, she actively champions free expression. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and The Sunday Times for two decades. Her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn is forthcoming from Archipelago.
Alex Dawe has translated Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute, for which he won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the former president of English PEN. The translator of books by Orhan Pamuk and Fethiye Cetin, she actively champions free expression. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and The Sunday Times for two decades. Her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn is forthcoming from Archipelago.
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