Other Colors - Essays and a Story

Zusatztext “Lyrical! vulnerable! deeply human and engaging. . . . [Pamuk] has become one of the essential writers that both East and West can gratefully claim as their own.” —Pico Iyer! The New York Times Book Review “Lyrical and reportorial. . . . Forms a remarkably cohesive picture of a literary man.” — The Washington Post Book World “Striking and valuable. . . . A triumph.” — The New York Review of Books “Reading these pieces one is infused with the sheer joy that exudes from each tale. . . . An autobiography in essays and tales! a book for writers and readers that is never less than captivating.” — The Baltimore Sun Informationen zum Autor Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006. His novel My Name is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Istanbuland New York. Klappentext In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of witty, moving, and provocative essays and articles. He engages the work of Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa, among others, and he discusses his own books and writing process. We also learn how he lives, as he recounts his successful struggle to quit smoking, describes his relationship with his daughter, and reflects on the controversy he has attracted in recent years. Here is a thoughtful compilation of a brilliant novelist's best nonfiction, offering different perspectives on his lifelong obsessions with loneliness, contentment, and the books and cities that have shaped his experience. Chapter One: The Implied Author I have been writing for thirty years. I have been reciting these words for some time now. I’ve been reciting them for so long, in fact, that they have ceased to be true, for now I am entering into my thirty-first year as a writer. I do still like saying that I’ve been writing novels for thirty years—though this is a bit of an exaggeration. From time to time, I do other sorts of writing: essays, criticism, reflections on Istanbul or politics, and speeches. But my true vocation, the thing that binds me to life, is writing novels. There are plenty of brilliant writers who’ve been writing much longer than I, who’ve been writing for half a century without paying the matter much attention. There are also the great writers to whom I return again and again, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Thomas Mann, whose careers spanned more than fifty years. . . . So why do I make so much of my thirtieth anniversary as a writer? I do so because I wish to talk about writing, and most particularly novel writing, as a habit. In order to be happy I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day. When I learned, as a child, that diabetics needed an injection every day, I felt bad for them as anyone might; I may even have thought of them as half dead. My dependence on literature must make me half dead in the same way. Especially when I was a young writer, I sensed that others saw me as cut off from the real world and so doomed to be “half dead.” Or perhaps the right term is “half a ghost.” I have sometimes even entertained the thought that I was fully dead and trying to breathe life back into my corpse with literature. For me, literature is a medicine. Like the medicine that others take by spoon or injection, my daily dose of literature—my daily fix, if you will—must meet certain standards. First, the medicine must be good. Its goodness is what tells me how true and potent it is. To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true—nothing makes me happier, nothing more surely binds me to life. I also prefer that the writer be dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, th...

Product details

• Authors: Orhan Pamuk
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.09.2011
• EAN: 9780307386236
• ISBN: 978-0-307-38623-6
• No. of pages: 464
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 205 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Türkische SchriftstellerInnen: Werke (div.)