For a lot of English-language readers, Turkish literature begins and ends with Orhan Pamuk, and honestly that makes sense. He is the Nobel winner, the writer most likely to be sitting on the “world literature” shelf looking elegant and just intimidating enough to send you back toward a detective novel instead. But Turkish literature is…
Teenage alienation is easy to romanticize after the fact. The cigarettes look better in memory. So do the leather jackets, messy bedrooms, loud guitars, dumb fights, desperate friendships, and late-night conviction that if you could only get out of this town, this school, this house, everything might finally begin. From a distance, it can all…
I’ve been thinking recently about how some albums seem to work as trilogies even when they’re not specifically framed that way. Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy would be the famous example. So famous, in fact, that I’m not even going to talk about it here. It has already been named, packaged, argued over, corrected, mythologized, and reissued…