YAZILMIŞ DÜNYA VE YAZILMAMIŞ DÜNYA
Bringing together some forty essays, articles and critical pieces that Italo Calvino published in various outlets, this selection – Yazılmış Dünya ve Yazılmamış Dünya (The Written and the Unwritten Word) – covers subjects such as the links between the activity of writing and the activity of reading, ways of reading, reasons for writing in a fast-changing world, the exercise of style and the importance of translation as a means by which literary experience circulates, cultural value, publishing and its strategies, modern developments in narrative prose, and the fantastic as a genre in its various historical manifestations.
Topics such as avant-garde literature, reading on holiday and different ways of reading also enter the world of ideas in Yazılmış Dünya ve Yazılmamış Dünya, shedding light not only on the creativity of one of the most important and innovative writers of 20th-century Italian and world literature, but also on his learning, his wide-ranging interests and his brilliant mind.
The articles, interviews and talks collected in Yazılmış Dünya ve Yazılmamış Dünya give us the portrait of a man striving to pay the utmost attention; a man always endeavouring to highlight and do justice to everything clear and planned, in literature and in life.
Tim Parks, TLS
Intelligent, witty, pleasantly erudite and sharp.
Alberto Manguel, Literary Review
Yazılmış Dünya ve Yazılmamış Dünya
Original title: Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto
Author: Italo Calvino
Translator: Esin Gören
Editor: Cem Alpan
Pages: 328
ISBN: 978-975-08-6717-0 Barcode: 9789750867170
YKY Literature / Essays
MEZOPOTAMYA – ESKİÇAĞ SANATI VE MİMARİSİ
Zainab Bahrani’s unique study offers a comprehensive survey of Mesopotamian art and architecture from 8000 BC to the arrival of Islam in AD 636.
Examining the origins of artistic representation in different civilisations – Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian and others – and the first appearance of public monuments, the book also explains how these images and monuments were seen by the people of the time.
With 414 illustrations, Mezopotamya (Mesopotamia) also includes a comprehensive glossary explaining concepts and technical terms specific to art history.
Mezopotamya – Eskiçağ Sanatı ve Mimarisi
Original title: Mesopotamia – Ancient Art & Architecture
Author: Zainab Bahrani
Translator: Aymesey Albay
Editor: Derya Önder
Pages: 376
ISBN: 978-975-08-6676-0 Barcode: 9789750866760
YKY Özel Dizi (Special Series)
CEHENNEMDE İLAHİ
Cehennemde İlahi (A Hymn in Hell) is the second stop on Rıdvan Hatun’s journey in the short story. The author, who made a name with stories published in the magazines Notos, Sözcükler, Varlık and kitap-lık, was shortlisted for the Sait Faik Story Prize and the Haldun Taner Short Story Award with her first book, Billur Örüntüler (Crystal Patterns, 2023).
Cehennemde İlahi contains seven lyrical stories. Threaded like the links of a chain necklace onto the outer text that frames the book, they define the author’s holistic approach. Each comes from a pen skilled at creating dreamlike images: plain, objective, serene, limpid, clear.
Rıdvan Hatun meets her readers with a minimal narrative full of traces of childhood and sparkling with poetic light.
Let us promise first: whatever happens, we will go on until we reach each other. On every forking path, in every story we turn into, let us find each other. That way none of us is left behind, and none of us reaches this darkness alone.
Cehennemde İlahi
Author: Rıdvan Hatun
Editor: Murat Yalçın
Pages: 104 Dimensions: 13.5 x 21 cm
Paper: Holmen 60 gsm + Card Cover
ISBN: 978-975-08-6724-8 Barcode: 9789750867248
YKY Literature / Short Stories
ZİLLİ ZARİFE
One of the second-period plays in Haldun Taner’s theatre, Zilli Zarife has been prepared by the author’s wife, Demet Taner, sixty years after it was written, and published in book form for the first time.
Of this two-act musical play, Haldun Taner said: “Since 1962 I have been in pursuit of a popular theatre whose essence, form and style are one hundred per cent our own. Zilli Zarife is my fourth act of resistance on this path.” It was first staged by the Gülriz Sururi-Engin Cezzar Company, directed by Mehmet Akan.
Written with the aim of ridiculing the exploitation of religion and moral hypocrisy, and of doing its modest bit towards a clearer, more honest climate – not by lecturing but by making people laugh – Zilli Zarife has been staged many times over the years and has taken its place among Taner’s major plays.
In her book Haldun Taner Tiyatrosu (The Theatre of Haldun Taner), Ayşegül Yüksel says of Zilli Zarife: “Zilli Zarife is a play in which actor, character, word, music, dance and audience are locked together – so lively, colourful and full of breath that it gives the impression of having been realised on stage first and only then set down on paper. Even when merely read, it retains its ‘playfulness’ from beginning to end; it is a vivid, colourful theatrical event that skilfully reconciles the author’s mischievous nature and his objective, critical perspective with the sense of ‘play’ it conveys. With Zilli Zarife, Taner achieved his most successful experiment in the ‘dynamic’, lively, fast-paced stage language required by the ‘cabaret’ theatre on which he would soon concentrate his work.”
Our aim is to ridicule the exploitation of religion and moral hypocrisy, and to do our modest bit towards a clearer, more honest climate. And to do so not by lecturing, but by making people laugh.
Haldun Taner
Zilli Zarife
Author: Haldun Taner
Editor: Murat Yalçın
Pages: 112 Dimensions: 13.5 x 21 cm
Paper: Holmen 60 gsm + Card Cover
ISBN: 978-975-08-6723-1 Barcode: 9789750867231
YKY Literature / Drama
UNUTULMAZ SUİT
No, life cannot be lived again… On the contrary, once lived, it is lost forever…
An extraordinary story from Akira Mizubayashi about souls torn apart by war and brought together by music.
Pamina, a young and successful luthier, is following in the footsteps of her grandmother Hortense Schmidt, who practised the same craft in Japan during the Second World War. Having started work in the atelier of a renowned master in Paris, Pamina is one day entrusted with a cello made by Matteo Goffriller. While repairing the instrument she finds inside it a letter written in April 1945, and the path of this music-loving woman comes to cross the lives of people who were both the subjects and the witnesses of a great love.
In Unutulmaz Süit (Suite inoubliable), Mizubayashi’s characters turn words into notes, as if in a piece of classical music that transcends borders and eras…
Unutulmaz Süit
Author: Akira Mizubayashi
Original title: Suite inoubliable
Translator: Şirin Etik
Editor: Korkut Erdur
Pages: 168
ISBN: 978-975-08-6722-4 Barcode: 99789750867224
YKY Literature / Novel
ANATOLIAN TOY CULTURE
Each time toys are brought up, children are the first thing to come to mind, and vice versa. Games and toys, both as vital to adults as they are to children, are generally doomed to either disappear or remain in museums and private collections, scattered across all four corners of the world, not to mention those that lie buried underneath the ground, left behind by humanity, waiting to be found for centuries or even millennia.
Anatolian Toy Culture is the outcome of twenty years’ worth of efforts at collecting artefacts, data and photographic documents, and ensure that they be submitted to interdisciplinary classification and expert assessment. This book contains the most comprehensive account so far of the colourful, creative, and truly astonishing adventure of toys in Anatolia, from the most ancient civilisations to the Ottoman Empire, and from the early decades of the Republican era until the present day…
Anatolian Toy Culture
Original title: Anadolu Oyuncak Kültürü
Edited by: Ayşe Ceren Göğüş, Doğanay Çevik
Translator: Baptiste Gacoin
Editor: Darmin Hadzibegoviç
Pages: 392
ISBN: 978-975-08-6671-5 Barcode: 9789750866715
YKY Özel Dizi (Special Series)
KİTAP-LIK 241 / JANUARY – MARCH 2026
Memet Fuat at 100
Issue 241 of Kitap-lık, dated January–March 2026, is devoted to Memet Fuat. In the magazine, now relaunched with a new cover, format and interior design, Memet Fuat is remembered on the 100th anniversary of his birth. The state of Memet Fuat’s books, the contents of the documents he left behind, the Pirâye Collection and the progress of work on the Yeni Dergi website are discussed in a session with Yeşim Bilge, Handan Durgut and Turgay Fişekçi, and important information and documents are presented.
Highlights of this issue include Mehmet Ergüven’s Doğurgan Eksilti, which discusses the problem of the ending or completion of a work of art; Jo Yoshida’s piece titled Proust ve Hekimler (Proust and the Physicians); and essays by Mukadder Özgeç on the similarities between the novels Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat) and Venus in Furs, by Faruk Turinay on Yahya Kemal’s perfectionism, by Gürsel Korat on the theme of travel in literature, and by Hüseyin Ferhad on essayists.
Issue 241 also features poems by Tuğrul Tanyol, Gültekin Emre, Cevdet Karal, Bâki Ayhan, Soner Demirbaş, Serhat Uyurkulak, Ersun Çıplak and İpek Seyalıoğlu; stories by Cevat Çapan, Nuray Tekin, Zehra Tırıl, Yalçın Tosun, Eylem Ata and Batıkan Köse; pieces by Abdullah Ezik, Robert Schild, Saba Öymen, Cemil Okyay and M. Şeref Özsoy; Hasan Türksel’s summer diary; and interviews with Yüksel Pazarkaya and İnci Aral.
For 33 years, kitap-lık has been the home of good literature.
Kitap–lık 241 / January – March 2026
Memet Fuat at 100
Editor: Murat Yalçın
Pages: 168
ISBN: 977-1300-0586-241 Barcode: 97713000586241
YKY Periodical / Magazine – Literature
