The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales

“With The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, we get his most impassioned plea for understanding Turkey’s wounded east… . This is what makes Edgü’s writing so exciting: his focus on the pendulum between comfort and danger, boredom and beauty; his attempts to unfurl the desire to be in a place that puts one’s life in danger.” —Kaya Genç, The Nation

“The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales achieves the bone-dry austerity that Edgü advocated. Aji’s translation captures this terseness in aphoristic, staccato sentences. On the page, the words are free to breathe, surrounded by empty space.” —William Armstrong, TLS

“A powerful tale.” —Paul Burke, European Literature Network

“In Edgü, one gets the sense that here—or rather, ‘there’—history itself doesn’t even exist.” —Ralph Hubbell, Words Without Borders

“Edgü sketches the austere beauty and stark violence of Turkey’s mountainous east and its borderlands in this spare and poignant collection…. In brief, melancholy views of the bleak landscape, Edgü cuts to the heart of the matter, evoking powerful emotions with few words. This will transport readers.” —Publishers Weekly

“A stark and ferocious love letter to a forgotten people, in a gorgeous translation that is utterly true to the wounded dreamscapes of the original. To read these pages is to be there, swept by mountain snows and the cruel winds of politics, undone by harsh beauty and the endless tragedy unfolding.” —Maureen Freely

“Ferit Edgü re-creates the yearning, severity, and timeless cycles of the Eastern Turkish landscape with intense lyricism and masterful sparsity. His unique voice has long been a force in Turkish literature and is translated by Aron Aji with the same haunting vigor.” —Ayşegül Savas

“The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales … bear witness with poetry and horror to a nightmarish history of state violence in eastern Türkiye and an often forgotten people.” —Kate Power, EBRD Literature Prize

Ferit Edg is a Turkish writer of poems, novels, and essays. He has been awarded both the prestigious Sait Faik Literature Prize and the Sedat Simavi Prize for Literature.

Aron Aji is a Turkish translator and the President of The American Literary Translators Association. He has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, and other Turkish writers. He is the Director of MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.

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