Musings : Shadow Dimensions: Plato's Cave, Wayang Kulit & the Literary Endeavor

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A reflection from a very thoughtful colleague. I loved her shadow-puppet analogy to the characters we create in our fiction. I think all of you, fellow writers and readers, will enjoy this.

Humble Musings of a Literary Kind: Shadow Dimensions: Plato's Cave, Wayang Kulit & the Literary Endeavor

And along the same lines, some of the shadow beings that populated Dickens' brain, and from there to ours.

Image at top: Shadow theater (more information at this site)
Dickens and his characters from New York Public Library Print Collection

"One World, Two Sultans"

BİR CİHAN İKİ SULTAN — "ONE WORLD, TWO SULTANS"

This is the Turkish translation of my novel A Gift for the Sultan, just published by Nokta publishers in İstanbul.

The phrase at the top is Timur ve Yıldırım'in Mücadelesi —“The struggle of Timur and Yildirim”

Timur was the khan from Samarkand we know as Tamerlane; Yildirim (or Yıldırım in Turkish), "Thunderbolt", was the nom de guerre of Sultan Bayezid (1354-1403), defeated by Timur in the Battle of Ankara, July 1402.

The novel is about much more than the struggle of these two fierce warriors — it is also about how a great city, Constantinople, confronts a terrible siege and about the complicated relations between Orthodox Greeks and Ottoman Muslims in this frontier period, when neither had unchallenged dominance of the region. But Timur and Yildirim's struggle is a big part of the story, and is of special interest to Turkish readers as part of their founding history.

A Gift for the Sultan (English-language original)

Turkish edition of "A Gift for the Sultan"

I'm delighted to announce that the Turkish-language version of A Gift for the Sultan has just been published by Nokta in Istanbul and presented at the TUYAP International Book Fair in that city. The Turkish title is Bir cihan iki sultan ("One World, Two Sultans").