Kaya Genç returns to the Turkey Book Talk podcast. This time he joins to discuss his new book “Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey,” which profiles young Turks from across the political spectrum.

Download the episode or listen below:

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My review of the book will be appearing in the next couple of weeks in the Times Literary Supplement so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Here’s the episode from earlier this year with Kaya discussing “An Istanbul Anthology”, which he edited:

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Many thanks to current supporters Özlem Beyarslan, Steve Bryant, Celia Jocelyn Kerslake and Aaron Ataman.

Özge Samancı talks to Turkey Book Talk about her bestselling graphic memoir “Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey” (Farrar Straux Giroux). It’s a charming book and everyone I know who has read it raves about it.

Download the podcast episode or listen below.

Subscribe to Turkey Book Talk :  iTunes / PodBean / Stitcher / Facebook / RSS

Here’s my review of the book from a few months ago.

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If you like this podcast and want to support independent podcasting, you can make a small or large monetary donation to Turkey Book Talk via Patreon.

Many thanks to current supporters Özlem Beyarslan, Steve Bryant, Andrew Cruickshank and Aaron Ataman.

My review this week was of “The Gardens of Silihdar,” Armenian feminist Zabel Yessayan’s (1878-1943) memoir of growing up in Ottoman Istanbul. Yessayan fled the city in 1915 after being included as the only woman on the Young Turk regime’s list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for detention and deportation. The book was first published in Soviet Armenia in the 1930s, shortly before Yessayan was arrested in Stalin’s purges and exiled to Siberia.

I caught up with translator Jennifer Manoukian to discuss Yessayan’s remarkable life and work. You can read the interview at the Hürriyet Daily News here.

Read my review of “The Gardens of Silihdar” here.

For those interested, both “The Gardens of Silihdar” and Yessayan’s novel “My Soul in Exile” were recently published in English translations by the small press of the Armenian International Women’s Association.

Talking Turkey

January 31, 2015

Just a quick post to say I’m going to be doing author interviews to accompany my book reviews in the Hürriyet Daily News. The interviews won’t be appearing every week, but if that week’s book is new, interesting, and the author is available, the conversation should be appearing shortly after the review. As the latter are published on Thursdays, that means either Friday or Saturday. I’ll be using the opportunity to discuss the main arguments in the book with the author, as well as some of the issues that I haven’t managed to address in the review.

Things got off to a good start a couple of weeks ago, when I spoke to Aaron Stein about his new book, “Turkey’s New Foreign Policy: Davutoğlu, the AKP and the Pursuit of Regional Order” (Routledge). Read the review here, and my chat with Aaron here.

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This week, I spoke to Ryan Gingeras about his book “Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey” (OUP). Here’s the review, and here’s the interview.

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Henceforth I’ll try to post links to both the reviews and the interviews here on the weekend after they come out.