Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal is an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force.
Memed—introduced in Kemal’s legendary first novel, Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his books—is one of the few truly mythic figures of modern fiction, a desperado and sometime defender of the oppressed who is condemned to wander in the blood-soaked gray zone between justice and the law. In They Burn the Thistles, one of the finest of Kemal’s novels, Memed is on the run. Hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit’s end, he has lost faith in himself and has retreated to ponder the vanity of human wishes. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful stallion, itself a hunted creature, serves to restore his determination and rouse him to action.
YASHAR KEMAL (1922–2015) was born into a Kurdish family in a village in southern Anatolia and saw his father brutally murdered at the age of five. He received his basic education in village schools before working as an agricultural laborer, factory-worker, public letter-writer, and journalist. His first novel, Memed, My Hawk won the Varlik Prize for best novel of the year in 1955. Kemal's numerous other books include The Wind from the Plain trilogy, Salman the Solitary, Seagull, and three other books recounting the expoits of Memed, including, They Burn the Thistles.
BILL MCKIBBEN is a former staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include Hundred Dollar Holiday, Maybe One, The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild. McKibben is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal is an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force.
Memed—introduced in Kemal’s legendary first novel, Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his books—is one of the few truly mythic figures of modern fiction, a desperado and sometime defender of the oppressed who is condemned to wander in the blood-soaked gray zone between justice and the law. In They Burn the Thistles, one of the finest of Kemal’s novels, Memed is on the run. Hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit’s end, he has lost faith in himself and has retreated to ponder the vanity of human wishes. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful stallion, itself a hunted creature, serves to restore his determination and rouse him to action.
Author
YASHAR KEMAL (1922–2015) was born into a Kurdish family in a village in southern Anatolia and saw his father brutally murdered at the age of five. He received his basic education in village schools before working as an agricultural laborer, factory-worker, public letter-writer, and journalist. His first novel, Memed, My Hawk won the Varlik Prize for best novel of the year in 1955. Kemal's numerous other books include The Wind from the Plain trilogy, Salman the Solitary, Seagull, and three other books recounting the expoits of Memed, including, They Burn the Thistles.
BILL MCKIBBEN is a former staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include Hundred Dollar Holiday, Maybe One, The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild. McKibben is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
