Other Colors: Essays and a Story

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, & the example of other writers.

Over the last three decades, Orhan has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, & 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 daughter’s 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 & again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne & Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, & commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk & dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading & writing.

By turns witty, moving, playful, & provocative, Other Colors glows with the energy of a master at work & gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme & shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.