Orhan Pamuk’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers.

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.

“Pamuk is that rarest of creatures, a fabulist of ideas…In Other Colors…Pamuk gives us several of his many selves in a centrifugal gathering of memory-pieces, sketches, interviews and unexpected flights…[that] feel more like a rich and suggestive set of explorations…His books are, really celebrations of multiplicity…the mysteries they set up are always more delicious than any attempt to solve them…Yet mostly what this collection gives us…is a chance to savor one of the inimitable literary storytellers of our time…Pamuk is taking the world we thought we knew and making it fresh and alive.”
- Pico Iyer, New York Times Book Review

“He is the poet of the labyrinth of his own thoughts and conceits, of the fabulous and the gently ambiguous.”
- Colin Thubron, The New York Review

“what emerges…is a voice, part playful and part deadly, whose refracted reality a real nightingale might envy.”
- Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Other Colors is composed of shrewdly arranged occasional pieces, fragments from journals and other miscellany, edited and at times rewritten to form a remarkably cohesive picture of a literary man…Beyond its clever charm and its wise observations Other Colors is a plea to stand back and consider the historical and psychological causes of today’s alarming headlines.”
- Roger Kaplan, Washington Post Book World

Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.

Preface

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