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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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I AM MY COUNTRY
And Other Stories
This is the first short story collection from the 2019 O. Henry Prize recipient and the 2020 Praire Schooner's Jane Geske Award winner, Kenan Orhan.
The collection features ten unforgettable, immersive stories set in Turkey that explore the sometimes absurd pursuit of hope in the face of oppression, displacement, and violence. These creative stories feature an eccentric cast of characters, spanning decades and landscapes, from forests along the Black Sea to villages along the Euphrates, from the streets of Istanbul to the mountains bordering Iraq.
The collection consists of two never-before-published stories serving as bookends in I AM MY COUNTRY: The titular story, and The Birdkeeper's Moral. The rest originally appeared in Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Another House, Massachusetts Review, Craft Literary, and elsewhere, but are revised and expanded for this collection.
Kenan Orhan's evocative stories evoke vivid moments of violence, like in The Smuggler and Festival of Bulls. They also turn lyrical, seen in Soma and The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra. In each case, Turkey's essence is laid to bare, reverberating long after the story's end.
Kenan Orhan is American born and raised but spent many summers visiting his relatives in Istanbul. Despite the very real inspirations for the collection, however, the author has said that the book is noticeably influenced by the narrative and stylistic traditions of Turkish literature as well as the fabulist/surrealist movements of Central and Eastern Europe, and contemporary Arabic fiction (stylistic influences as Italo Calvino, Hassan Blasim, Ay?e Papatya Bucak, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Maria Reva, Ahmed Saadawi, Osama Alomar, as well as the poetic influences of Anne Carson and Michael Ondaatje).
The collection consists of two never-before-published stories serving as bookends in I AM MY COUNTRY: The titular story, and The Birdkeeper's Moral. The rest originally appeared in Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Another House, Massachusetts Review, Craft Literary, and elsewhere, but are revised and expanded for this collection.
Kenan Orhan's evocative stories evoke vivid moments of violence, like in The Smuggler and Festival of Bulls. They also turn lyrical, seen in Soma and The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra. In each case, Turkey's essence is laid to bare, reverberating long after the story's end.
Kenan Orhan is American born and raised but spent many summers visiting his relatives in Istanbul. Despite the very real inspirations for the collection, however, the author has said that the book is noticeably influenced by the narrative and stylistic traditions of Turkish literature as well as the fabulist/surrealist movements of Central and Eastern Europe, and contemporary Arabic fiction (stylistic influences as Italo Calvino, Hassan Blasim, Ay?e Papatya Bucak, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Maria Reva, Ahmed Saadawi, Osama Alomar, as well as the poetic influences of Anne Carson and Michael Ondaatje).
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Book
Published 2023-04-18 by Random House |