The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey

by Kaya Genç

Overview

Turkey is a land torn between East and West, and between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, jourbanalist and novelist Kaya Genc travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and jourbanalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighbourhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations. The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale.

Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genc takes the reader on a contemporary jourbaney through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788314961
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/17/2019
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kaya Genç 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. 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. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction
1. A Winter of Despair
2. A Spring of Hope
3. A Summer of Disssent
4. A Fall of Silence

Acknowledgements
Index

Editorial Reviews

The brilliant Kaya Genç returbans 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

From the Publisher