The Sea Crossed Fisherman

A tale of greed, hatred and decay from Turkey's legendary novelist Yashar Kemal Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. In a sudden, chance encounter in a coffee-house in a fishing village near Istanbul, Zeynel Celik shoots a local gangster. Only one man intervenes – the village outcast Fisher Selim – and in doing so inadvertently transfers the blame for the murder onto himself. From this one simple act, Zeynel becomes a legendary outlaw in the minds of the people, whereas Fisher Selim, passionate about the sea and haunted by a lost love, is cast as an eccentric oddball. Each is pursued by his own paranoia, memories of the past and hopes for the future, until their paths cross once again on Selim’s boat, and their obsessions come to a resolution. Reflective and lyrical, the novel offers insight into the Turkish mentality while drawing universally valid conclusions, and manages to be both brutally savage and deeply humane.

A violent chance encounter in a small Turkish fishing village results in a murder, for which Fisherman Selim is unfairly blamed. The story follows the fisherman and the actual villain, Zeynel, who committed the murder and leads a life of crime.

This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.

Time’s Fool: Essays in Context is a collection of essays on a broad range of topics, from Gilgamesh to James Joyce – and beyond: to Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Yaşar Kemal, Cormac McCarthy, Abdulrahman Munif, and many others. Time’s Fool is a memorial to the life work of A. Clare Brandabur, who walked away from a tenure-track teaching position at the University of Illinois to embark on a career of teaching in Middle Eastern universities in Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, occupied Palestine, Cyprus, Ankara, and finally Istanbul, where she taught for the last decade and a half of her life. Had Clare stayed with a career at a “Research I” university in the United States, her scholarship would have been far less rich and free-wheeling – more narrow, concentrated, and specialized – and she would not have been able to help and inspire her graduate and undergraduate students from the Near East and, especially during her last five or six years at Fatih University, from around the world. The essays are organized into five main groups, from “Gender and Family Relations” and “Ecocriticism,” to “Colonialism and Post-Colonialism,” “Colonialism and Ireland,” and “Colonialism, Palestine, Genocide”; and a final ‘catch-all’ section of “Miscellaneous Essays” that includes Gilgamesh, T.E. Lawrence, Yaşar Kemal, Graham Green, and modern theory. There are also sub-categories that transcend the six sections, such as Arab Literature, Catholicism, Women’s Studies, and Mythology – something for everyone, in short. Clare’s essays give a sense of her breadth of scholarship and her very rich play of mind, but the real monument to her life’s work is in the hearts and minds of the students from around the world whom she influenced.

Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes explores the values, perceptions, and transformations of the environment, ecology, and nature in Turkish culture, literature, and the arts. Through these themes, it examines historical and contemporary environmentally engaged literary and cultural traditions in Turkey. The volume re-imagines Turkey in its geo-social and ecocultural narratives of multiple connections and complexities, in its multi-faceted webs of histories, and in its rich multispecies stories.