Short Stories & Anthologies
![Kenan Orhan - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B0BCCH2R3J.jpg)
I Am My Country: And Other Stories
A fiercely imaginative debut story collection by "a startling talent who can seemingly do anything" (Anthony Marra) explores the lives of ordinary people in Turkey to reveal how even individual acts of resistance have extraordinary repercussions.
"No recent collection has captivated me as much as I Am My Country. You must read it!"-Andrew Sean Greer
Spanning decades and landscapes, from the forests along the Black Sea to the streets of Istanbul, Kenan Orhan's playful stories conjure dreamlike worlds-of talking animals, flying houses, and omniscient prayer-callers-to examine humanity's unfaltering pursuit of hope in even the darkest circumstances.
A determined florist trains a neighborhood stray dog to blow up a corrupt president. A garbage collector finds banned instruments-and later, musicians-in the trash and takes them home to form a clandestine orchestra in her attic. A smuggler risks his life to bring a young woman claiming to be pregnant via immaculate conception across the border with Syria. A poor cage-maker tries to use his ability to talk to birds to woo his childhood love just before the 1955 Istanbul pogrom. These characters are united by a desperate yearning to break free from the volatile realities they face: rising authoritarianism, cultural and political turmoil, and staggering violence.
Ranging from the absurd to the tenderhearted, the stories in I Am My Country illuminate the constant force amid one country's history of rampant oppression and revolutionary progress: the impulse to survive.
"No recent collection has captivated me as much as I Am My Country. You must read it!"-Andrew Sean Greer
Spanning decades and landscapes, from the forests along the Black Sea to the streets of Istanbul, Kenan Orhan's playful stories conjure dreamlike worlds-of talking animals, flying houses, and omniscient prayer-callers-to examine humanity's unfaltering pursuit of hope in even the darkest circumstances.
A determined florist trains a neighborhood stray dog to blow up a corrupt president. A garbage collector finds banned instruments-and later, musicians-in the trash and takes them home to form a clandestine orchestra in her attic. A smuggler risks his life to bring a young woman claiming to be pregnant via immaculate conception across the border with Syria. A poor cage-maker tries to use his ability to talk to birds to woo his childhood love just before the 1955 Istanbul pogrom. These characters are united by a desperate yearning to break free from the volatile realities they face: rising authoritarianism, cultural and political turmoil, and staggering violence.
Ranging from the absurd to the tenderhearted, the stories in I Am My Country illuminate the constant force amid one country's history of rampant oppression and revolutionary progress: the impulse to survive.
Editorial Reviews
The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra
Selim the halfwit hoarded everything from the trash-that was the story they told me my first day on the job at the waste management office. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he'd taken up hoarding as a way to fill the hole. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked-small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes-picked out of the top of garbage bins. But the way it goes, everyone said, it's not long until you're taking home half the bin, raking through it for treasure and convincing yourself of the value of each thing. How stupid, you say, how stupid of people to discard such beautiful and useful things. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he'd thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead. Then he installed a system of boards and beams into the frame of the house, with maybe two or three inches of clearance from his head, in order to pile trash above him. More and more he took from the waste bins: old tattered books, bicycle bits, apple cores, orange peels, broken printers, smashed-up furniture, crumpled cartons and boxes, hundreds of kilograms of paper, pens, eyeglasses, eggshells, water bottles, shoes with holes, sleeping bags with urine stains, jackets too small, jackets too large, bedframes, filing cabinets, coffee mugs, coffee grounds-on and on, an impossible list of trash weighed down on those boards and beams until at last, while his dreams of finding his wife in all this waste were licking the night sky, the house's framing broke and the collected works of the city's refuse crashed down upon Selim the halfwit, killing him not instantaneously, but swiftly enough to confuse Selim into believing in his deliverance.
The garbagemen laughed at the end of the story, and then the oldest one, without a hint of jest, indeed with genuine concern, said to me: "And you are doubly at risk, because a woman hoards more than a man."
And the other garbagemen stopped their laughing and nodded solemnly. The nearest to me said: "We make light of a truth; it is easy to find the merits in another's garbage if only because we hope someone will treat our own legacies with such care."
I smiled and laughed and so did they, and they all went out to their tasks. I found my assignment: a truck helmed by two men named Hamit and Mehmet. I hopped into the cab. The older man, Hamit, drove us off to our route, and as he did Mehmet said that I shouldn't take anything the others said seriously. "Garbagemen, for who knows why, make up myths and tales more readily than any other profession. Still, it is not good to take fr...
Selim the halfwit hoarded everything from the trash-that was the story they told me my first day on the job at the waste management office. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he'd taken up hoarding as a way to fill the hole. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked-small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes-picked out of the top of garbage bins. But the way it goes, everyone said, it's not long until you're taking home half the bin, raking through it for treasure and convincing yourself of the value of each thing. How stupid, you say, how stupid of people to discard such beautiful and useful things. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he'd thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead. Then he installed a system of boards and beams into the frame of the house, with maybe two or three inches of clearance from his head, in order to pile trash above him. More and more he took from the waste bins: old tattered books, bicycle bits, apple cores, orange peels, broken printers, smashed-up furniture, crumpled cartons and boxes, hundreds of kilograms of paper, pens, eyeglasses, eggshells, water bottles, shoes with holes, sleeping bags with urine stains, jackets too small, jackets too large, bedframes, filing cabinets, coffee mugs, coffee grounds-on and on, an impossible list of trash weighed down on those boards and beams until at last, while his dreams of finding his wife in all this waste were licking the night sky, the house's framing broke and the collected works of the city's refuse crashed down upon Selim the halfwit, killing him not instantaneously, but swiftly enough to confuse Selim into believing in his deliverance.
The garbagemen laughed at the end of the story, and then the oldest one, without a hint of jest, indeed with genuine concern, said to me: "And you are doubly at risk, because a woman hoards more than a man."
And the other garbagemen stopped their laughing and nodded solemnly. The nearest to me said: "We make light of a truth; it is easy to find the merits in another's garbage if only because we hope someone will treat our own legacies with such care."
I smiled and laughed and so did they, and they all went out to their tasks. I found my assignment: a truck helmed by two men named Hamit and Mehmet. I hopped into the cab. The older man, Hamit, drove us off to our route, and as he did Mehmet said that I shouldn't take anything the others said seriously. "Garbagemen, for who knows why, make up myths and tales more readily than any other profession. Still, it is not good to take fr...
Readers Top Reviews
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra
Selim the halfwit hoarded everything from the trash-that was the story they told me my first day on the job at the waste management office. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he'd taken up hoarding as a way to fill the hole. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked-small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes-picked out of the top of garbage bins. But the way it goes, everyone said, it's not long until you're taking home half the bin, raking through it for treasure and convincing yourself of the value of each thing. How stupid, you say, how stupid of people to discard such beautiful and useful things. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he'd thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead. Then he installed a system of boards and beams into the frame of the house, with maybe two or three inches of clearance from his head, in order to pile trash above him. More and more he took from the waste bins: old tattered books, bicycle bits, apple cores, orange peels, broken printers, smashed-up furniture, crumpled cartons and boxes, hundreds of kilograms of paper, pens, eyeglasses, eggshells, water bottles, shoes with holes, sleeping bags with urine stains, jackets too small, jackets too large, bedframes, filing cabinets, coffee mugs, coffee grounds-on and on, an impossible list of trash weighed down on those boards and beams until at last, while his dreams of finding his wife in all this waste were licking the night sky, the house's framing broke and the collected works of the city's refuse crashed down upon Selim the halfwit, killing him not instantaneously, but swiftly enough to confuse Selim into believing in his deliverance.
The garbagemen laughed at the end of the story, and then the oldest one, without a hint of jest, indeed with genuine concern, said to me: "And you are doubly at risk, because a woman hoards more than a man."
And the other garbagemen stopped their laughing and nodded solemnly. The nearest to me said: "We make light of a truth; it is easy to find the merits in another's garbage if only because we hope someone will treat our own legacies with such care."
I smiled and laughed and so did they, and they all went out to their tasks. I found my assignment: a truck helmed by two men named Hamit and Mehmet. I hopped into the cab. The older man, Hamit, drove us off to our route, and as he did Mehmet said that I shouldn't take anything the others said seriously. "Garbagemen, for who knows why, make up myths and tales more readily than any other profession. Still, it is not good to take from the trash. Once you start, there's no stopping. Eventually you'll find yourself buried under it."
A day became a week, became a month, became a year as it happens. Mehmet and Hamit made me go down the thinnest alleys of Beyoğlu because they had round bellies they couldn't squeeze between the buildings, and they laughed at themselves so that their laughter accentuated their jiggling, round bellies. They gave me a slender handcart to navigate and said, "So long, we'll see you at the end of the maze."
I went down the thin alleys because I was the thinnest, but it's not hard to be the thinnest garbageman when you're a woman. My small handcart scraped its sides against brick and stucco and stone-sometimes, too, my shoulders would scrape the walls, and I worried that over time I might erode a small Elif-shaped tunnel into the alley, or worse, the alley would grind me down into a rectangle.
I stopped at the small back doors and loading zones, the garbage bins always stuffed to overflowing, but really only half full because people are very bad at the economy of space. I emptied the bins into my handcart and continued on to the next little station, on and on all afternoon until I came out the other end of the byzantine alleyways soiled and sweating. Then I waited for Mehmet and Hamit to finish their route in the truck and pick me up. They didn't make me squeeze between them in the cab. Whoever was in the passenger seat always moved over to let me sit by the rolled-down window.
You can tell a lot about someone from the way their trash comes to occupy a trash bin. Take, for example, the bin I pull from this sunny corner-crooked between a barbershop and a pizza place: every day it's full of sheets of music, not the kind printed in a book and tossed out by someone quitting the piano, but handwritten compositions, sometimes crumpled in disappointment, sometimes scribbled over with one, two, three layers of corrections. The man who lives on the secon...
Selim the halfwit hoarded everything from the trash-that was the story they told me my first day on the job at the waste management office. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he'd taken up hoarding as a way to fill the hole. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked-small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes-picked out of the top of garbage bins. But the way it goes, everyone said, it's not long until you're taking home half the bin, raking through it for treasure and convincing yourself of the value of each thing. How stupid, you say, how stupid of people to discard such beautiful and useful things. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he'd thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead. Then he installed a system of boards and beams into the frame of the house, with maybe two or three inches of clearance from his head, in order to pile trash above him. More and more he took from the waste bins: old tattered books, bicycle bits, apple cores, orange peels, broken printers, smashed-up furniture, crumpled cartons and boxes, hundreds of kilograms of paper, pens, eyeglasses, eggshells, water bottles, shoes with holes, sleeping bags with urine stains, jackets too small, jackets too large, bedframes, filing cabinets, coffee mugs, coffee grounds-on and on, an impossible list of trash weighed down on those boards and beams until at last, while his dreams of finding his wife in all this waste were licking the night sky, the house's framing broke and the collected works of the city's refuse crashed down upon Selim the halfwit, killing him not instantaneously, but swiftly enough to confuse Selim into believing in his deliverance.
The garbagemen laughed at the end of the story, and then the oldest one, without a hint of jest, indeed with genuine concern, said to me: "And you are doubly at risk, because a woman hoards more than a man."
And the other garbagemen stopped their laughing and nodded solemnly. The nearest to me said: "We make light of a truth; it is easy to find the merits in another's garbage if only because we hope someone will treat our own legacies with such care."
I smiled and laughed and so did they, and they all went out to their tasks. I found my assignment: a truck helmed by two men named Hamit and Mehmet. I hopped into the cab. The older man, Hamit, drove us off to our route, and as he did Mehmet said that I shouldn't take anything the others said seriously. "Garbagemen, for who knows why, make up myths and tales more readily than any other profession. Still, it is not good to take from the trash. Once you start, there's no stopping. Eventually you'll find yourself buried under it."
A day became a week, became a month, became a year as it happens. Mehmet and Hamit made me go down the thinnest alleys of Beyoğlu because they had round bellies they couldn't squeeze between the buildings, and they laughed at themselves so that their laughter accentuated their jiggling, round bellies. They gave me a slender handcart to navigate and said, "So long, we'll see you at the end of the maze."
I went down the thin alleys because I was the thinnest, but it's not hard to be the thinnest garbageman when you're a woman. My small handcart scraped its sides against brick and stucco and stone-sometimes, too, my shoulders would scrape the walls, and I worried that over time I might erode a small Elif-shaped tunnel into the alley, or worse, the alley would grind me down into a rectangle.
I stopped at the small back doors and loading zones, the garbage bins always stuffed to overflowing, but really only half full because people are very bad at the economy of space. I emptied the bins into my handcart and continued on to the next little station, on and on all afternoon until I came out the other end of the byzantine alleyways soiled and sweating. Then I waited for Mehmet and Hamit to finish their route in the truck and pick me up. They didn't make me squeeze between them in the cab. Whoever was in the passenger seat always moved over to let me sit by the rolled-down window.
You can tell a lot about someone from the way their trash comes to occupy a trash bin. Take, for example, the bin I pull from this sunny corner-crooked between a barbershop and a pizza place: every day it's full of sheets of music, not the kind printed in a book and tossed out by someone quitting the piano, but handwritten compositions, sometimes crumpled in disappointment, sometimes scribbled over with one, two, three layers of corrections. The man who lives on the secon...
