PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Kaya Genc is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Salon, Guernica Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Millions, The White Review and TIME Magazine, among others. His first novel, L Avventura was published in 2008. Kaya has a PhD in English literature and is the Istanbul correspondent of The LA Review of Books as well as a contributing editor at Index on Censorship. His article for The LA Review of Books Surviving the Black Sea was selected as one of best non-fiction pieces of 2014 by The Atlantic. He has written a history of Turkish literature for Harvard University Press, and is the author of Under the Shadow (I.B.Tauris, 2017), an account of the Gezi Park uprisings and the coup attempt of December, 2016.
The individual narratives of the people Genc writes about, or through, compose the book's story as a whole while situating it within the fluctuating political atmosphere of the country. This anchoring moves the reader through various human experiences - disappointment, failure, representation - with thorough exploration and deep empathy, while also examining potential future projections of a young nation. * Full Stop * His English has a clear, distanced perceptivity underscored by his cultural and linguistic objectivity. The Lion and the Nightingale, however, enters deeply into the work of fellow Turkish journalists who write in Turkish, with special empathy for their struggles, personalities, and careers on the other side of a distinctly opaque language barrier. * The Millions * Usefully grounds Turkish current affairs in the context of the past couple of decades and explains the attraction of extreme politics to the country's youth * Times Literary Supplement * Whether he's putting us in the shoes of Binevs, a Kurdish cleaner, or OEzge Ersoy, a Turkish curator living in Hong Kong, Genc conveys the on-the-ground experience with great empathetic clarity. The Lion and the Nightingale reminds us that, now more than ever, anything that clouds our vision - be it ignorance, credulity, cliche, fluff, propaganda, the silencing of journalists, fake news, romanticism - must be urgently dissipated. * Culture Trip * The brilliant Kaya Genc returns again to examine modern Turkey with his blend of deep historical learning, on-the-ground reporting, and hard-won, convention-defying nuance. * Molly Crabapple, author of 'Drawing Blood' * In this masterful chronicle of Turkey, Genc sketches extraordinary lives in an extraordinary time. Intimate, intelligent, detailed, full of life: It will become a classic. * Andrew Greer, author of 'Less' - 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner *
