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Waiting for the Fear

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Short stories about people on the margins, from story peddlers to beggars, by one of Turkey's most innovative fiction writers, now in a new English translation.
A giant of modern Turkish literature, Oğuz Atay remains largely untranslated into English. First published in 1975, Waiting for the Fear is Atay's only collection of short stories, praised by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk for having transformed the art of short fiction.
Atay's stories are vivid with life's absurdities and psychologically true to life, while his characters, oddballs and losers all, are utterly individual. A brilliant examiner of the inner life, Atay is no less aware of the flawed social world in which his people struggle to make their way, and he is exceptionally attuned to the strange power storytelling itself can exert over fate. In the title story, a nameless young man returns to his home on the outskirts of an enormous nameless city to discover that he has received a letter in a language he neither knows nor recognizes—after which, step by step, the inscrutable missive reshapes his world. In "Railroad Storytellers: A Dream," a professional story peddler lives in a hut beside a train station in a country that is at war—unless it isn't. He can't remember. What do such life and death realities matter, however, so long as there are stories to tell?
Ralph Hubbell's fluent and vigorous English rendering of this key work of world literature is a revelation.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 15, 2024
      Turkish writer Atay (1934–1977) makes his English-language debut with this alluring 1975 collection, sharply translated by Hubbell, of dreamlike fables and horror stories. Each entry, several of which take the form of letters, brims with longing for human connection and is packed with parenthetical asides that lay bare their narrators’ fears of being misunderstood. In “A Letter,” a newspaper advice columnist shares (with his own interjections) a deranged letter he’s received from a man who has fallen obsessively in love. In the brief but tense “The Forgotten,” a woman finds her ex-boyfriend dead in her attic, which leads to a deeper, weirder excavation of her memories. In “Railway Storytellers—a Dream,” three people live near a train station in the middle of nowhere, a setting that feels out of time, and sell stories they’ve written to passengers. In the mesmerizing title novella, a man receives a letter that feels threatening, though it’s in a language he can’t understand. As he explores its meaning, the letter’s contents begin to derail his life, and its consequences sever his connection to the real world and the other people around him. Devotees of modernist literature will be grateful for Atay’s hypnotic and intense writing.

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