We’re excited to announce that our August Book Club selection is Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s debut story collection, The Trojan War Museum: and Other Stories, forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Company on August 20, but available to Rumpus Book Club members in just a few weeks!
In Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is “performed” at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war.
Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated story collection Get in Trouble, writes:
One of the best and most surprising collections I’ve read in a long time. This is a wonder cabinet of stories, every story so singular and marvelous that I spent a long time after each, wanting to linger in the space it had created.
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by July 15 to join us in reading The Trojan War Museum: and Other Stories, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with author Ayşe Papatya Bucak about the book!
