Join us for a virtual discussion of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, featuring translator Maureen Freely, Merve Emre, and Ayşegül Savas.
This event is co-sponsored by Community Bookstore, Third Place Books, the Transnational Literature Series, and Lost City Books.
About the book
An unnamed writer embarks on an obsessive journey through Europe, drawn to the gravesites of her literary idols—Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka—putting her life, her writing, and her politics in conversation with theirs. Untethered and spirit-like herself, she moves among European cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and Belgrade. At times there are companions—lovers and others—but she remains steadfast in her solitude. As she is uncannily drawn to 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.
About the authors
Tezer Özlü (1943–1986) claimed her place in Turkish letters by breaking every rule imposed on her. Though she was misunderstood by most throughout her short life, her writings have gone on to inspire a new generation of feminist writers and readers. Her English-language debut, Cold Nights of Childhood won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. Journey to the End of Life is her second novel to be translated into English.
Maureen Freely is a writer, translator and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies and a member of English PEN. She is the author of six novels, three works of non-fiction and is the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.
Ayşegül Savas is the author of the novels The Anthropologists, White on White, and Walking on the Ceiling, 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.
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 earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (Norton US / Harper Collins UK).