Orhan Pamuk | Orhan Pamuk

Mar.30.2012 Taking risks In the last couple of weeks, among the books I’ve been reading have been two that combine remarkable risk-taking in subject matter with deep, rich research and gorgeous structures: Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, which I’ve been rereading as part of my winter teaching, and my friend Melissa Pritchard...	Oct.14.2011 Ghostbusters On my way to a Litquake event – Stories on Stage: Family, dramatic readings of stories by Ann Packer, Melanie Rae Thon, and Jennifer Egan, I stopped at Yerba Buena Gardens and sat down on a stone bench. Groups of people in high business dress marched past, men slept beside their carts of...
Sep.10.2010 Reading Pamuk in Istanbul I confess that, before this summer, I had never read the Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk despite having bought his Snow when the English translation was published in 2004. The novel sat on my shelf, unopened, not because I dreaded reading it but because I had moved on to other books. When I...	Jul.15.2010 The Barbara Cartland of Cairo…Sort of: Sanna Negus’s Writing Life interview Cairo is a place we all know to some extent, even if only in the romantic images of the pyramids and the Sphinx. A short visit there is enough to make you wonder about how much of this teeming metropolis you really don’t know. No writer gets so deep as Sanna Negus under the skin of this ancient...
Feb.28.2010 Toward A New Free Press This week two book-related happenstances led my thoughts in the same direction. I sat down to read Orhan Pamuk’s newest book, The Museum Of Innocence, and pal Dave Roberts, movie soundman extraordinaire, offered up three of his books for me to read: Brotherhood of Warriors, Licensed to Kill, and...	Jan.19.2010 Hrant Dink Remembered Three years ago today an assassin's bullet killed Hrant Dink. Three shots fired into the back of his head. Hrant Dink, Turkish-Armenian, journalist, editor-in-chief and one of the founders of Agos, the first Armenian-Turkish newspaper published in Turkey, died in broad daylight on the streets of...
Nov.20.2009 How writers write I love this Wall St. Journal article about writers sharing their processes. Maybe it’s the onset of fall, the recent time change, or the fact that Mercury was in retrograde for a while — but I’ve found that this article has really resonated with fellow writers, not only for the insider’s view into...	Nov.13.2009 Gold Leaf (A.S. Byatt, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, The Arabian Nights, and the tyranny of “fast-paced” fiction) A.S. Byatt, in her delicious, capacious, didactic, magical, magisterial new novel, The Children’s Book, both makes/recreates a world and tells a long, rich story. I confess that, though I love many minimalist works, this is the kind of writing that brought me into a life of reading and writing...
Nov.16.2008 How do the careers of psychiatrist and writer intersect? I like the way Victor Frankl defines success and the elusive nature of happiness: “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue . . . Happiness must happen, and the same...	Aug.09.2008 Why do I write? Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2006... In his Nobel Lecture, Pamuk provides a fairly comprehensive reply to the question, "Why do you write?" Who has not been asked that question? Is there any writer who has not asked herself / himself that question? Why? Why the fuck am I doing this...