Aslı Erdoğan: The Stone Building and Other Places

Vivid stories from one of Turkey’s most admired contemporary female authors, whose political activism has made her the target of state persecution.

Three interconnected stories feature women whose lives have been interrupted by forces beyond their control. Exile, serious illness, or the imprisonment of one’s beloved are each met with versions of strength and daring, while there is no undoing what fate has wrought. These atmospheric, introspective tales culminate in an experimental, multi-voiced novella, whose “stone building” is a metaphor for the various oppressive institutions—prisons, police HQs, hospitals and psychiatric asylums—that dominate the lives of all of these characters. Here is a literary distillation of the alienation, helplessness, and controlled fury of exile and incarceration—both physical and mental—presented in a series of moving, allegorical portraits of lives ensnared by the structures of power.

Aslı Erdoğan (Istanbul, 1967) is a renowned, prize-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist whose fiction has been translated into many languages. She has published novels, collections of short stories and poetic prose, and selections from her political essays. As a journalist, she has covered controversial topics such as state violence, discrimination, and human rights, for which she has been persecuted in a variety of ways.

Erdogan was imprisoned for four months by the Turkish government in a sweeping roundup of dissident voices after the failed coup attempt of July 2016. The subject of both PEN International and PEN America advocacy campaigns, she was released from prison in late December 2016.

This is her second work to be translated into English.

“Aslı Erdoğan is an exceptionally perceptive and sensitive writer who always produces perfect literary texts.”—Orhan Pamuk, author of The Red-Haired Woman

Title The Stone Building and Other Places
Author Aslı Erdoğan
Translated by Sevinç Türkkan
Publisher City Lights Publishers
literature in translation
Title First Published 27 February 2018
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 0872867501
ISBN-13 9780872867505
Publication Date 27 February 2018
Main content page count 174
List Price $15.95

# new novel
Aslı Erdoğan
fleursdumal.nl magazine

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