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A celebration of Sait Faik’s A Useless Man at 192 Books

May 27, 2015 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

On Wednesday, May  27, at 7 pm, please join us to celebrate Turkish short story master Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s A Useless Man: Selected Stories, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexader Dawe. Hosted together with 192 Books, the evening will feature a conversation with co-translator Maureen Freely and author and critic Edmund White.

Sait Faik Abasıyanık was born in Adapazarı in 1906 and died in Istanbul in 1954. In twelve books of short stories, two novels, and a book of poetry, Sait Faik’s prose celebrates the natural world and renders in vivid detail the struggles of his characters: ancient coffeehouse proprietors and priests, dream-addled fishermen and poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. Many stories are loosely autobiographically and deal with Sait Faik’s frustration with social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the slow yet steady ethnic cleansing of his city. Seemingly in keeping with the restrictions that the new Republic placed on language and culture, the fluid, limpid surfaces of these tales craftily veil the deeper truths lying in their subversive undercurrents. Sait Faik is greatly revered to this day, lending his name to Turkey’s most prestigious short story award. Nearly every Turk knows by heart a line or a story by Sait Faik.

 

Freely MaureenMaureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the President of English PEN. Translator of five books by Orhan Pamuk, Fethiye Cetin’s My Grandmother, and – with Alexander Dawe – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and The Sunday Times for two decades. Her novels include Sailing through Byzantium, Enlightenment, Angry in Piraeus, and The Other Rebecca.

 

 

 

White-EdmundEdmund White is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including the novels A Boy’s Own Story and Jack Holmes & His Friend; the memoirs My LivesCity Boy, and Inside a Pearl; and various other works of non-fiction, such as biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. After living in France for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.

 

Details

Date:
May 27, 2015
Time:
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Venue