Journey to the Edge of Life
Journey to the Edge of Life
Tezer Özlü
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely.
A writer finds solitude and salvation tracing the lives and deaths of three of her literary lights in a haunted and lyrical travelogue from NBCC Award–winner Tezer Özlü.
On an obsessive journey through Europe, a woman drawn to the gravesites of her literary idols—Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka—puts her life, her writing, and her politics in conversation with theirs.
Untethered and spirit-like herself, she moves from lover to lover, city to city: Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, Belgrade. As she is uncannily drawn to the site of Pavese’s suicide, her journey transmutes passion for literature into desire for meaning.
Occupying a liminal space between past and present, life and death, Journey to the Edge of Life is a deeply inquisitive, atmospheric, and rebellious novel that shows what such a journey can mean for a woman who has spent her life within the confines established by others.
Praise for Cold Nights of Childhood
“In Özlü’s posthumous English-language debut, a young woman describes her 1950s childhood and her treatment for mental illness in her 20s. 'All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie,' says the narrator... The edition includes a magnificent introduction from Ayşegül Savaş, who puts Özlü (1943–1986) in a lineage with Italo Svevo and Franz Kafka and praises her frank approach to sexuality as 'neither sensational nor metaphorical.'”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“It’s uncanny how clearly Özlü speaks of a different time yet, simultaneously, of this moment.”—The Financial Times
“While these facts of Özlü’s life story overlap with the events of Cold Nights, the interest of the book is not so much its autobiographical mirror but the way that life is endowed with an electric mutability. Madness, after all, disrupts the temporal narrative. Here, time is broken and reshuffled through the sharp-edge of consciousness. The self is peeled away layer by layer to arrive at its core: 'Then slowly, very slowly, I begin to remember. Myself. This is me. I am twenty-five years old. I am a woman. I am living through the second part of the madness that begins with joy. I have suffered the anguish of lethargy.'”—Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White
“For fans of Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy, Özlü's book is an intense yet sparsely written coming-of-age novel following a young girl become a young woman through psych wards, shock treatments, and explorative sexual encounters. At once salacious and deeply, honestly felt, Cold Nights of Childhood forces its reader to look at the world as it does: dark, difficult, and sensual.”—Kyle Williams, McNally Jackson Books (NYC)
“Özlü’s semi-autobiographical novel often finds itself in the moment before the sunrise. Sometimes reveling in the dark by the sea, sometimes under the harsh fluorescent falsehood of involuntary institutionalization. Existing in those moments before the day breaks, this novel moves in ways I’ve never felt a book move before. Between lovers and electroshock sessions, through countries, in tight sentences that whorl, like Charybdis, into something compelling and dangerous.”—Bee, Pegasus Books (Berkeley, CA)
Product Info
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Fiction/Literary
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 120 Pages
Rights: WE
979-8-89338-000-2
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