Waiting for the Fear

Short stories about people on the margins, from story peddlers to beggars, by one of Turkey’s most innovative fiction writers, now in a new English translation.

A giant of modern Turkish literature, Oğuz Atay remains largely untranslated into English. First published in 1975, Waiting for the Fear is Atay’s only collection of short stories, praised by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk for having transformed the art of short fiction.

Atay’s stories are vivid with life’s absurdities and psychologically true to life, while his characters, oddballs and losers all, are utterly individual. A brilliant examiner of the inner life, Atay is no less aware of the flawed social world in which his people struggle to make their way, and he is exceptionally attuned to the strange power storytelling itself can exert over fate. In the title story, a nameless young man returns to his home on the outskirts of an enormous nameless city to discover that he has received a letter in a language he neither knows nor recognizes--after which, step by step, the inscrutable missive reshapes his world. In ＂Railroad Storytellers: A Dream,＂ a professional story peddler lives in a hut beside a train station in a country that is at war--unless it isn’t. He can’t remember. What do such life and death realities matter, however, so long as there are stories to tell?

Ralph Hubbell’s fluent and vigorous English rendering of this key work of world literature is a revelation.

Oğuz Atay (1934-1977) was a Turkish modernist writer. His experimental, linguistically complex novels earned him a reputation as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Turkish literature and a pioneer of the modern Turkish novel. He published two novels in the 1970s, The Disconnected and Dangerous Games, and wrote several other short stories and plays.

Ralph Hubbell is a translator of Turkish literature and writer. His fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in the Sun, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, Asymptote, and elsewhere. He teaches at Loyola University Maryland and lives in Baltimore