This week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century Turkish humorist Aziz Nesin at The Millions. Nesin, who Genç compares to Christopher Hitchens and […]
...moreWriting from Turkey, a country that temporarily unplugged Twitter to quell government protests, novelist and essayist Kaya Genç describes the experience of disconnecting from the service. Instead of the liberation he expected, the lack of Twitter left him feeling like a prisoner in solitary confinement: On my third day without Twitter, however, I realized that I […]
...more“The Apparent Author,” Meriç Algün Ringborg’s latest exhibition in Istanbul’s Gallery NON, presents a sound installation of an author talking about “her artistic goals, ambitions, and potentials,” as Rumpus contributor Kaya Genc writes in The Paris Review. Genc makes a startling observation about the author’s workplace: there is “a shelf holding more than one hundred […]
...moreIn 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay called “Books vs. Cigarettes,” trying to figure out which habit cost him more and whether books were simply out of some people’s financial reach. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaya Genç updates the calculations in an essay titled “Ebooks vs. Lattes” (he already quit smoking several years […]
...moreMy leaves are my eyes, I look in amazement I watch you with one hundred thousand eyes, I watch Istanbul Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran wrote those words about a tree in Gulhane Park, but after the recent protests in Istanbul, they seem to apply equally well to Gezi Park. At the PEN Atlas, Kaya Genç has […]
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