Orhan Pamuk Books

A Strangeness In My Mind is a novel Orhan Pamuk has worked on for six years. It is the story of boza seller Mevlut, the woman to whom he wrote three years' worth of love letters, and their life in Istanbul. In the four decades between 1969 and 2012, Mevlut works a number of different jobs on the streets of Istanbul, from selling yoghurt and cooked rice, to guarding a car park. He observes many different kinds of people thronging the streets, he watches most of the city get demolished and re-built, and he sees migrants from Anatolia making a fortune; at the same time, he witnesses all of the transformative moments, political clashes, and military coups that shape the country. He always wonders what it is that separates him from everyone else - the source of that strangeness in his mind. But he never stops selling boza during winter evenings and trying to understand who his beloved really is. What matters more in love: what we wish for, or what our fate has in store? Do our choices dictate whether we will be happy or not, or are these things determined by forces beyond our control? A Strangeness In My Mind tries to answer these questions while portraying the tensions between urban life and family life, and the fury and helplessness of women inside their homes.

Öteki Renkler, Orhan Pamuk’un “Pencereden Bakmak” adlı hikâyesiyle, 1980’lerin sonundan 1990’ların sonuna dek yurtiçi ve yurtdışında çeşitli dergilere yazdığı yazılardan, yaptığı söyleşilerden, günlük parçalarından, yerli ve yabancı birçok yazar üstüne yazdıklarından ve politik makalelerinden oluşan zengin bir seçki. Yazarın romanlarını sevenler için onu daha yakından tanıma, yazara yabancı olanlar içinse Pamuk’un dünyasına iyi bir giriş sayılabilecek Öteki Renkler, yıllar boyunca tekrar tekrar dönülüp okunacak bir kitap. Pamuk kişisel ve edebi dünyasını okurlarına içtenlikle açıyor... Öteki Renkler Orhan Pamuk’un çocukluk anılarından mutluluk saatlerine, romanlarını nasıl yazdığından gezi notlarına, sevdiği yazarlar ve kitaplar hakkındaki eleştirilerinden kişisel itiraflarına, şikâyetlerine, siyasi öfkelerine, kültür ve gündelik hayat konusundaki heyecanlarına uzanıyor ve yazarın yalnız romanda değil, düzyazıda da ne kadar usta olduğunu kanıtlıyor. Kaleme aldığı makalelerden, tuttuğu defterlerden, verdiği röportajlardan yapılan bu titiz seçmede, Pamuk kızı Rüya ile olan arkadaşlığını, sigarayı bırakışını, gençlik bunalımlarını, günlük hayatını, sinema zevkini, Boğaz yangınlarını, bildiği İstanbul’u, yalnızlık ve mutlulukla ilgili takıntılarını, toplumun ve kendisinin korkularını ve paranoyalarını anlatıyor. Yazar kitabında ayrıca Dostoyevski’den Tanpınar’a, Kemal Tahir’den Oğuz Atay’a pek çok yazarı ve kitaplarını tartışıyor; roman kuramı, Doğu ve Batı, milliyetçilik ve Avrupa üzerine düşüncelerini açıyor. Nişantaşı’nda geçen ve bir çocuğun gözünden anlatılan “Pencereden Bakmak” adlı uzun hikâye ile birlikte bu kitap, Orhan Pamuk’un Nobel Ödülü’ne uzanan başarılı yolculuğunda renkli dünyasına ışık tutuyor.

The streetscapes of Istanbul as photographed by Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in an exquisitely printed clothbound edition The dominant color in Orhan Pamuk's new book of photographs is orange. When the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist is finished with the day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighborhoods, visiting the backstreets of his town, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, spaces with a particular light. This is the orange light of Istanbul's windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood--from the Istanbul of 50 years ago, as he mentions in his introduction. But Pamuk also observes that the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy white light from new lightbulbs. His photographs from the backstreets of Istanbul record and preserve the cosy effect of this old, disappearing orange light, as well as the recognition of this new white vision. Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us the unseen corners of his home city.

The Museum of Innocence - set in Istanbul between 1975 and today - tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Fusun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique.

Tells the story of Galip, an Istanbul lawyer whose wife has vanished. Playing the part of private investigator, he soon finds himself descending deeper and deeper into an extraordinary mystery.

Orhan Pamuk's reflections span fourteen years, blending his daily thoughts with personal illustrations. This collection reveals his journeys, family influences, and the intricacies of his bond with Turkey, offering insights into the inspirations behind his novels. Alongside his writings, vibrant paintings showcase the landscapes that fuel his creativity. This volume serves as a captivating exploration of Pamuk's inner world, inviting readers to engage with the art, culture, and political nuances that have influenced his literary voice.

Istanbul is a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006, was born in Istanbul, 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 Ottoman Empire. As he companionably guides us across the Bosphorus, through Istanbul's historical monuments and lost paradises, its dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, he also introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers. Like the Dublin of Joyce and Jan Morris' Venice, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

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 metre by metre, the two will develop a father-son bond that neither has known before. But in the nearby town, where they spend their evenings, the boy will find an irresistible diversion. The Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a travelling theatre group, catches his eye, and she seems as fascinated by him as he is by her. But in his distraction a horrible accident occurs, and he will spend his life unaware of the outcome, or who the Red-Haired Woman was, until many years later.

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; by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red 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 journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness. Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties

In the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. At a time of violent fundamentalism, however, this is a dangerous proposition.