Edited by Jim Hinks and Gul Turner

This book brings together ten short stories from some of Turkey’s leading writers, taking us on a literary tour of the city, from its famous landmarks to its darkened back streets, exploring the culture, history, and most importantly people that make it the great city it is today. From the exiled writer recalling his appetite for a lost lover, to the mad, homeless man directing traffic in a freelance capacity… the contrasting perspectives of these stories surprise and delight in equal measure, and together present a new kind of guide to the city.

Comma Press, 25 November 2010

Edited by Aleksandar Hemon

Dalkey Archive Press, 22 November 2010

“Professional Behavior,” by Turkey’s Ersan Üldes, is a good example of the anthology’s constant merger of ingenuity and insight. The story starts off with an engaging literary conceit: a translator begins making up false versions of the novels he renders into Turkish, giving greater prominence to the characters he prefers while changing the features that he finds clichéd. Eventually, though, he comes up against a writer whose books challenge his sense of superiority. The encounter adds unexpected layers to our appreciation of the translator’s personality, which is simultaneously self-effacing and arrogant, opportunistic in some ways and honorable in others.

Starred Review. With authors ranging from the familiar (Hilary Mantel) to the obscure (Macedonia's Blaze Minevski) to the internationally acclaimed but underappreciated in the U.S.A. (Spain's Enrique Vila-Matas; Hungary's László Krasznahorkai; Poland's Olga Tokarczuk), the second volume of this lauded series makes good on the first's promise. Zurab Lezhava's "Sex for Fridge" is the madcap story of a Georgian woman who tries to trade her body for a discount on a run-down refrigerator. Iulian Ciocan's "Auntie Frosea" takes as its depressing protagonist an impoverished Moldovan housewife whose only knowledge of the world outside her village comes from the beamed-in Brazilian soap opera she's addicted to. There's also plenty of Euro-surrealism: Olga Tokarczuk's haunting "The Ugliest Woman in the World" tells the story of a man who marries and has kids with a rather unbecoming woman, while László Krasznahorkai's "The Bill" is a nine-page, one-sentence meditation on the zone between male desire and possession. With stories from Montenegro, Cyprus, and even tiny Liechtenstein aside works from Turkey, Estonia, and most of Western Europe, this edition packs both a stylistic punch and a satisfying range. (Nov.) (c) 
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The Turkish story, Ersan Uldes’s “Professional Behavior,” captures something of the playful and adventurous spirit with which Mr. Hemon has put the collection together. In it a translator takes it upon himself, with amusing results, to “improve” the prose of the German novelist whose work he is supposed to render into Turkish. “I think the word that best describes my activities might be ‘correction,’ ” he reasons. “Or maybe ‘revision’ ... or how about ‘polishing’?... But look, whichever sounds the least criminal, that’s the one I’d like to go with.”

Click on the above link to read the interview with Ersan Üldes as contributing author in Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2011 anthology.