Other Colors: Essays and a Story by Pamuk, Orhan; Freely, Maureen (Translated by) - 2008

New York: Vintage Books, 2008. xi, 433 pages, illustrations; 21 cm. Translated from the Turkish. Tight, clean copy. First edition thus. "Orhan Pamuk's first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers. Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces--=personal, critical, and meditative--the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughters precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing. By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, Other Colors glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood--its precise shade--in the spectrum of significance. / Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul." - Publisher.. 1st. Paperback. Fine. 8vo.