Join Merve Emre, Ayşegül Savaş, and translator Maureen Freely for a virtual conversation on Journey to the Edge of Life, a haunted and lyrical travelogue from National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Tezer Özlü. Presented in partnership by Community Bookstore, Third Place Books, the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, and Lost City Books.
Register for a link to attend this virtual event from 12 to 1 p.m. PDT.
About Journey to the Edge of Life
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 grave sites 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.
"Gorgeous... Özlü’s discursive narrative finds great clarity and beauty."—Publishers Weekly
Tezer Özlü (1943–1986) claimed her place in Turkish letters by breaking every rule imposed on her. Though she was dismissed by many and misunderstood by most throughout her short life, her writings have gone on to inspire a new generation of feminist writers and readers. Cold Nights of Childhood, her first book to be translated into English, won the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize.
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Ferrante Letters , and The Personality Brokers.
Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels The Anthropologists, White on White, and Walking on the Ceiling; the story collection Long Distance; and the nonfiction book The Wilderness. Her work has been translated into seven languages and her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in Paris.
Maureen Freely grew up in Istanbul and now lives in England. The author of seven novels, and formerly the president and chair of English PEN, she has translated many Turkish classics as well as Orhan Pamuk. She teaches at the University of Warwick.