Orhan Pamuk - Free Library Land Online - Holiday

Snow

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 09:10:50 +0200

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red ("a sumptuous thriller"--John Updike; "chockful of sublimity and sin"--New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings--for love, art, power, and God--set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity--a frozen sea these many years--leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.

No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely...

My Name is Red

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 20:09:51 +0200

The Black Book

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 09:10:50 +0200

The Black Book is a stunning tapestry of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture which confirms Orhan Pamuk's reputation s a writer of international stature, comparable to Borges and Calvino.
Galip is an Istanbul lawyer, and his wife, Ruya, has vanished. Could she be hiding out with her half brother, Jelal, a newspaper columnist whose fame Galip envies? And if so, why isn't anyone in Jelal's flat?
As Galip plays the part of private investigator, he assumes the identity of Jelal himself, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even faking his wry columns, which he passes off as the work of the missing journalist. But the amateur sleuth bungles his undercover operation, and with dire consequences.
Richly atmospheric and Rabelaisian in scope, The Black Book is a labyrinthine novel suffused with the sights, sounds, and scents of Istanbul. An unforgettable evocation of the city where East meets West, The Black Book is a boldly unconventional mystery that plumbs the...

Nights of Plague

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:10:55 +0200

1901. Night draws in.
With the stealth of a spy vessel, the royal ship Azizye approaches the famous vistas of Mingheria. 'An emerald build of pink stone'. The 29th state of the ailing Ottoman Empire.
The ship carries Princess Pakize, the daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them holds a separate mission. Not all of them will survive the weeks ahead. Because Mingheria is on the cusp of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague - rumours some in power will try to suppress.
Plague is not the only killer.
Soon, the eyes of the world will turn to this ancient island, where the future of a fragile empire is at stake, in a rich and epic mystery of passion, fear, scandal and murder, from one of history's master storytellers.

The Innocence of Memories

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 10:58:28 +0200

The Innocence of Memories is an important addition to the oeuvre of Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. Comprised of the screenplay of the acclaimed film by Grant Gee from 2015 (by the same name), a transcript of the author and filmmaker in conversation, and captivating colour stills, it is an essential volume for understanding Pamuk's work.Drawing on the themes from Pamuk's best-selling books, The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul and The Black Book, this book is both an accompaniment to the author's previous publications and a wonderfully revelatory exploration of Orhan Pamuk's key ideas about art, love, and memory.

The White Castle

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:10:49 +0200

Other Colors

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:45:37 +0200

The Red-Haired Woman

Sat, 25 Nov 2017 09:10:47 +0200

From the Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author of Snow and My Name Is Red, a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them.
On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before—not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world. But in the nearby town, where they buy provisions and take their evening break, the boy will find an irresistible diversion. The Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a travelling theatre company, catches his eye and seems as fascinated by him as he is by her. The young man's wildest...

Silent House

Fri, 25 Nov 1983 09:10:46 +0300

Never before published in English, Orhan Pamuk’s second novel is the story of a Turkish family gathering in the shadow of the impending military coup of 1980.
In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran afoul of the sultan’s grand vizier and arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her constant servant Recep, a dwarf -- and the doctor’s illegitimate son. Despite mutual dependency, there is no love lost between mistress and servant, who have very different recollections -- and grievances -- from the early years, before Cennethisar grew into a high-class resort surrounding the family house, now in shambles.
Though eagerly anticipated, Fatma’s grandchildren bring little consolation. The eldest, Faruk, a dissipated historian, wallows in alcohol as he laments his inability to tell the story of the past from the kaleidoscopic pieces he finds in the local archive; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün, has yet to discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics; and Metin, a high school nerd, tries to keep up with the lifestyle of his spoiled society schoolmates while he fantasizes about going to America -- an unaffordable dream unless he can persuade his grandmother to tear down her house.
But it is Recep’s nephew Hasan, a high school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.
By turns deeply moving, hilarious, and terrifying, Silent House pulses with the special energy of a great writer’s early work even as it offers beguiling evidence of the mature genius for which Orhan Pamuk would later be celebrated the world over.

My Name Is Red

Sun, 25 Nov 2001 10:50:26 +0200

One of the Nobel Prize winner’s best-loved novels, in a special edition featuring an introduction by the author and a chronology of Islamic and Western art history that provides additional context for this dazzling story of a murdered artist in sixteenth-century Istanbul.

From Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed Turkish novelist Pamuk offers this fascinating murder mystery set against the backdrop of 16th-century Istanbul. The story surrounds a sultan who commissions a book to celebrate his life and times, as well as a set of talented artists hired to recreate the work in the European style. But when one of the artists disappears, the answer to his whereabouts seems to lie in the images themselves. British narrator John Lee reads with a classical tone, drawing on his theatrical experience to create a rousing, epic, but personal reading sure to appeal to a wide range of listeners. Lee reads with such inherent skill that his words seem to be coming straight from memory, recreating Pamuk's ancient world in colorful clarity. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 6).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

In 16th-century Istanbul, master miniaturist and illuminator of books Enishte Effendi is commissioned to illustrate a book celebrating the sultan. Soon he lies dead at the bottom of a well, and how he got there is the crux of this novel. A number of narrators give testimony to what they know about the circumstances surrounding the murder. The stories accumulate and become more detailed as the novel progresses, giving the reader not only a nontraditional murder mystery but insight into the mores and customs of the time. In addition, this is both an examination of the way figurative art is viewed within Islam and a love story that demonstrates the tricky mechanics of marriage laws. Award-winning Turkish author Pamuk (The White Castle) creatively casts the novel with colorful characters (including such entities as a tree and a gold coin) and provides a palpable sense of atmosphere of the Ottoman Empire that history and literary fans will appreciate. Recommended. Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A Strangeness in My Mind

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 09:10:51 +0200

From the Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author of Snow and My Name Is Red: a soaring, panoramic new novel--his first since The Museum of Innocence--telling the unforgettable tale of an Istanbul street vendor and the love of his life.

Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of twelve, he comes to Istanbul--"the center of the world"--and is immediately enthralled both by the city being demolished and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza (a traditional Turkish drink) on the street, and hoping to become rich, like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But chance seems to conspire against him. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her...

The Museum of Innocence

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:10:48 +0200

Istanbul

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:10:48 +0200

A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy--or hüzün-- that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.

With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters--both Turkish and foreign--who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce's Dublin and Borges' Buenos Aires, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

The New Life

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:10:47 +0200

Osman is a young university student whose life is changed by a chance encounter with a mysterious book. Osman becomes obsessed with the book, which seems to contain all the magic and power of life and love. Romantic and elusive, The New Life is a rhapsody to love and an investigation into the shadowy nature of self.