Waiting for the Fear - by Oguz Atay (Paperback)

About the Book

"Oæguz Atay (1934-1977), one of the most influential figures of 20th century Turkish literature, was not only a writer and a professor, but also a civil engineer. Aside from his widely acclaimed novels, in this book of collected stories, Atay engineers the language of a historically multilayered society that was in the midst of a cultural and political transition. By smoothly mending the autobiographical and the fictional, he invites the reader into a maze of seamlessly shifting narrative voices"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Astonishing, deeply wry ... a collection of eight short stories by one of the most influential and inventive Turkish writers of the 20th century, Oguz Atay. These linguistically playful, slightly surreal stories, written in the 1970s, center on the down-and-out misfits and oddballs who struggle to connect with the rest of society." --Ayten Tartici, The New York Times

"Turkish writer Atay makes his English-language debut with this alluring 1975 collection, sharply translated by Hubbell, of dreamlike fables and horror stories.... Devotees of modernist literature will be grateful for Atay's hypnotic and intense writing." --Publishers Weekly

"The eight exquisite stories in Waiting for the Fear are a perfect introduction to Oğuz Atay's world." --Oğuz Demiralp

"Much like a fire or a sinkhole, Atay himself was an unforgiving force of nature. Rejecting both the nostalgic allure of the past and the vacuous imitation of the present, his writing sought to transform the literary conventions of his era." -- Eamon Mcgrath, LARB

"This fear remains a defining feature of Turkish culture and politics.... I felt grateful to Atay for articulating its centrality and pervasiveness so many years ago." -Kaya Genc, The Point

About the Author

Oğuz Atay (1934-1977) was a Turkish modernist writer. His experimental, linguistically complex novels earned him a reputation as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Turkish literature and a pioneer of the modern Turkish novel. He published two novels in the 1970s, The Disconnected and Dangerous Games, and wrote several other short stories and plays.

Ralph Hubbell is a translator of Turkish literature and writer. His fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in the Sun Magazine, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House's Lost & Found, Asymptote, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he works as the senior program coordinator in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers, The Ferrante Letters, and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.