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

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

Roger Kaplan, Washington Post Book World

LIVING AND WORRYING

1. The Implied Author

2. My Father

3. Notes on April 29, 1994

4. Spring Afternoons

5. Dead Tired in the Evening

6. Out of Bed, in the Silence of Night

7. When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You Sleep?

8. Giving Up Smoking

9. Seagull in the Rain

10. A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore

11. To Be Happy

12. My Wristwatches

13. I’m Not Going to School

14. Rüya and Us

15. When Rüya Is Sad

16. The View

17. What I Know About Dogs

18. A Note on Poetic Justice

19. After the Storm

20. In This Place Long Ago

21. The House of the Man Who Has No One

22. Barbers

23. Fires and Ruins

24. Frankfurter

25. Bosphorus Ferries

26. The Islands

27. Earthquake

28. Earthquake Angst in Istanbul

BOOKS AND READING

29. How I Got Rid of Some of My Books

30. On Reading: Words or Images

31. The Pleasures of Reading

32. Nine Notes on Book Covers

33. To Read or Not to Read: The Thousand and One Nights

34. Foreword to Tristram Shandy:

Everyone Should Have an Uncle Like This

35. Victor Hugo’s Passion for Greatness

36. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: The Joys of Degradation

37. Dostoyevsky’s Fearsome Demons

38. The Brothers Karamazov

39. Cruelty, Beauty, and Time: On Nabokov’s Ada and Lolita

40. Albert Camus

41. Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of Unhappiness

42. The World of Thomas Bernhard’s Novels

43. Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature

44. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and the Freedom of the Writer

POLITICS, EUROPE, AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF BEING ONESELF

45. PEN Arthur Miller Speech

46. No Entry

47. Where Is Europe?

48. A Guide to Being Mediterranean

49. My First Passport and Other European Journeys

50. André Gide

51. Family Meals and Politics on Religious Holidays

52. The Anger of the Damned

53. Traffic and Religion

54. In Kars and Frankfurt

55. On Trial

56. Who Do You Write For?

MY BOOKS ARE MY LIFE

57. The White Castle Afterword

58. The Black Book: Ten Years On

59. A Selection from Interviews on The New Life

60. A Selection from Interviews on My Name Is Red

61. On My Name Is Red

62. From the Snow in Kars Notebooks

PICTURES AND TEXTS

63. Sirin’s Surprise

64. In the Forest and as Old as the World

65. Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective Novels

66. Entr’acte; or, Ah, Cleopatra!

67. Why Didn’t I Become an Architect?

68. Selimiye Mosque

69. Bellini and the East

70. Black Pen

71. Meaning

OTHER CITIES, OTHER CIVILIZATIONS

72. My First Encounters with Americans

73. Views from the Capital of the World

THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW

MY FATHER’S SUITCASE

Index