The Bastard of Istanbul (Paperback)
by Elif Shafak

Paperback $14.00

In her second novel written in English (The Saint of Incipient Insanities was the first), Turkish novelist Shafak tackles Turkish national identity and the Armenian “question” in her signature style. In a novel that overflows with a kitchen sink’s worth of zany characters, women are front and center: Asya Kazanci, an angst-ridden 19-year-old Istanbulite is the bastard of the title; her beautiful, rebellious mother, Zeliha (who intended to have an abortion), has raised Asya among three generations of complicated and colorful female relations (including religious clairvoyant Auntie Banu and bar-brawl widow, Auntie Cevriye). The Kazanci men either die young or take a permanent hike like Mustafa, Zeliha’s beloved brother who immigrated to America years ago. Mustafa’s Armenian-American stepdaughter, Armanoush, who grew up on her family’s stories of the 1915 genocide, shows up in Istanbul looking for her roots and for vindication from her new Turkish family. The Kazanci women lament Armanoush’s family’s suffering, but have no sense of Turkish responsibility for it; Asya’s boho cohorts insist there was no genocide at all. As the debate escalates, Mustafa arrives in Istanbul, and a long-hidden secret connecting the histories of the two families is revealed. Shafak was charged with “public denigration of Turkishness” when the novel was published in Turkey earlier this year (the charges were later dropped). She incorporates a political taboo into an entertaining and insightful ensemble novel, one that posits the universality of family, culture and coincidence.

The Cleft: A Novel
by Doris Lessing

Paperback $13.95

Eminent novelist Lessing offers an alternative origin story for the human race, indirectly recalling the alternate world speculations of her Canopus in Argos SF novels. Positing that the primal human stock was female rather than male, Lessing invents a cult of ancient women called the Clefts, a name derived, in part, from that essential part of female anatomy. The story of the Clefts is bookended by the journal of a Roman historian, who interprets ancient documents stating that females were originally impregnated by a fertilizing wind or a wave, to give birth to female children. But one day a deformed baby is born, with a lumpy swelling never seen before. The first rape and the first murder follow soon enough, as do the first instances of consensual intercourse and the babies—the first of a new race, with a nature derived from both sexes—that are the result. Humor, which may or may not be intentional, is introduced into a generally lethargic text when women and men discover they can’t live with or without each other, and the battle of the sexes commences. The novel has elements of a feminist tract, but the story it tells doesn’t present a significant challenge to that of Adam and Eve.

The Aeneid
by Virgil, intro. by Bernard Knox, translated by Robert Fagles

Paperback $16.00

With his translations of Homer’s classic poems, Robert Fagles gave new life to seminal works