Today's Hours
Berji Kristin by
The cast-offs of modern urban society are driven out onto the edges of the city and left to make a life there for themselves. They are not, however, in any natural wilderness, but in a world of refuse and useless junk - a place which denies any form of sustainable life. Here, the unemployed, the homeless, the old and the bereft struggle to build shelters out of old tin cans, scavenge for food and fight against insuperable odds. And yet somehow they survive: it seems that society thrives on the garbage hills because it has always been built on one. In this dark fairy tale full of scenes taken from what has increasingly become a way of life for many inhabitants on this planet, Latife Tekin has written a grim parable of human destiny.
Money Makes Us Relatives by
In the rural immigrant community of Istanbul, poor women spend up to fifty hours a week producing goods for export, yet deny that they actually 'work'. Money Makes Us Relatives asks why Turkish society devalues women's work, concealing its existence while creating a vast pool of cheap labor for the world market. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among family producers and pieceworkers, and using fascinating case studies throughout, Jenny B. White shows how women's paid work is viewed in terms of kinship relations of reciprocity and obligation - an extension of domestic work for the family, which is culturally valued but poorly compensated. Whilst offering the benefits of social identity and long-term security, women's work also reflects global capitalism's ability to capture local cultural norms, and to use these to lower production costs and create exploitative conditions. This fully revised second edition includes a new introduction and conclusion, updated references, comparative material on women's labor elsewhere in the world, and brand new material on Islam, globalization, gender and Turkish family life. It is an important contribution to debates about women's participation in late global capitalism.
The Other Side of the Mountain by
Tracing the lives of three generations of a Turkish family, from the Ottoman Empire to the 1990s, this winner of Turkey's most prestigious literary prize follows a daughter who journeys back to her mother's student days at Cambridge and later struggles to find a place in Ataturk's new social order.
What Have You Carried Over? by
Poetry. Edited by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne. Translations from the Turkish by Ruth Christie, Cemal Demircioğlu, Arzu Eker-Roditakis, Talat S. Halman, Mel Kenne, Nermin Menemencioğlu, Önder Otçu, Saliha Paker, Dionis Coffin Riggs, İpek Seyalioğlu, Sidney Wade, and Özcan Oğuz Yalım. In a poll conducted by the longstanding Milliyet Arts Journal in 2008, Gülten Akin (1933-) was voted the 'greatest living Turkish poet' by an outstanding majority of Turkey's writers, poets, and literary critics.