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"He had sought to be the agent of all forces and actions on the Earth, and thus, just as he had transformed iron ingot into a music box, so had he strived to transform the Earth and all it contained into a machine." Ihsan Oktay Anar's 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a skeleton key to the ever-inventive author's fictional world set in the Ottoman times. Here are the wonderful histories of the triumphs and tribulations of three Ottoman inventors, "as reported by the narrators of events and relators of traditions." By turns humorous and touching, these interlinked stories are nutshells of vividly imagined past. While we follow Yafes Chelebi and his two successors in their search for the secret of the perpetual motion, the crumbling empire undergoes drastic changes in the background and the city of their dreams, Istanbul, witnesses coup d'états, Westernizing reforms, and the advent of technological innovation. Written in a unique idiom that is both a tender mimicry and witty parody of the Ottoman bureaucratic prose, "The Book of Devices is Anar" at his imaginative best. One cannot help but wonder how a twenty-first-century author can dwell in the past with such ease and come back to the present, as in a Borgesian parable, with a cabinet of dreamy curiosities.

"Esraris, the pure, the benevolent, those who reach out to the poor in their snow-covered houses not with stories of salvation but with blankets, realists who bide their time. They do not revolt, nor do they hide." *** "The Tribe of the Esraris." is an acclaimed Turkish poet's heartfelt commentary on our times, an inquiring companion to the new millennium. In a series of fragmentary prose pieces on a wide range of topics, Ahmet Guntan offers new ways to break the proverbial "silence" of the poet and tackle the world head-on. He takes the floor as one of the Esraris, the eponymous tribe of uneasy souls, and builds the framework of a poetics of deeper engagement with the world around us. Reading in part like a philosophical diary, The Tribe of the Esraris. is a wake-up call to be heard, a poetic testimony written with olive trees, income inequality, and E.M. Cioran in mind. "I find Guntan's writing intriguing and poetic, suggestive almost like haiku, far-ranging from international politics to observations of some corner of Istanbul. His culture is immense (from Proust to the hadith) and his thoughts uncannily original. This is the spirituality of the 21st century." Edmund White