wrote
his first short stories
during english
composition exams, under
duress. won a prize for
his two novels that
appeared in 1992, but did
not bother to pick it up.
held one reading in 1993,
but onlyt the clerk next
door showed up. has been
working at yapı
kredi publications,
one of the biggest
publishing houses in
turkey, since 1992. has
been living in kadıköy,
istanbul, since 1986.
cem
akas has published five
novels, four collections
of short stories and a
volume of essays. his
work is marked by a
strong sense of structure
and intrigue, humor, and
command of dialogue; in
fact, he has been dubbed
"the play-setter of
turkish literature".
anthology of the
intersections of a point (1990),
his first collection of
short stories, has been
praised as "the M.A.
thesis of a slightly
drunk sociologist cum
physicist cum 'twilight
Zone' scriptwriter."
In 1992, akas published
two novels to wide
critical acclaim: 7
is the pseudo-documentary
story of the initiation,
rise and fall of an
underground prophet,
intertwined with the
account of an
occasionally
"eroto-graphic"
and eventually violent
relationship, and
"trompes
d'oeil" about the
nature of reality and
fiction. crime and
punishment is akas's
second novel; his version
is much shorter than the
russian original, and has
two beginnings: on one
side is a perversely
analytical essay on how
writers kill their
characters in their
fiction, which evolves
into an exploration of
the possibility of
readers killing authors
through the act of
reading itself. on the
reverse side is the diary
of the author of the
essay, who is under the
severe delusion that he
is hounded by a terrorist
organization - this is a
personal account of the
single-handed battle he
wages (in the style of
the old don) in a world
where to read is to kill.
In
1995 cem akas published
another book of short
stories, entitled secret
air museum, in which
he emulates the styles of
cortazar, calvino,
barthelme, asimov,
burgess and borges.
published without its
real author's name, this
book has been
"deciphered" as
a typically akasian work,
and a silent yet clever
rebuttal of the
post-modernist claim that
the "author" is
dead. early in 2000 the
first volume of the trilogy
of the age of maturity
appeared: where the
fish fell captive.
the trilogy involves a
world, set roughly in the
2100's, where a
transnational company
called the Project aims
to install a new caste
system based on the
privilege to use
technology. a group of
rebels try to organize an
upheaval against this
scheme, only to find out
that the real plan is
much more complicated.
the remaining volumes of
the trilogy appeared in
2001: quicklime
and the empire of
games.
in
2002, akas published his
collected short stories
under the title r,
a consonant he has
trouble pronouncing.
notes
on 7-the
religion:
yagmur, who owns a
second-hand bookstore in
istanbul, introduces her
new boyfriend hakan to an
underground religion
called kronk (she
allegedly knows about
kronk through the books
that end up in her shop),
and it soon becomes clear
that hakan is the
long-awaited second
prophet. the
"church"
promptly splits into two:
those who remain loyal to
the first prophet who has
lately withdrawn himself
from the limelight,
versus those, the
underdogs, who hail hakan
as their savior and the
harbinger of the promised
golden age. hakan seems
at first to be
enthusiastic about
becoming a professional
prophet, but then
realizes he can't keep a
straight face, and his
amusement ends abruptly
and definitely when he
finds out that yagmur is
second only to the
prophet himself in the
kronkian hierarchy and
has strong ambitions of
her own, determined to
destroy both prophets
should they stand in her
way. it is at this point
that the first prophet
decides to throw in his
weight in favor of the
second (i.e., against
yagmur), and the author
decides to appear on the
scene. 7-the religion
is made up of 128
short scenes and reads
like a hybrid of
screenplay and novel; it
is upbeat, at times
funny, touching,
clinical.
7-the
religion
other
stuff to read:
did i ever promise you a rose garden?
the last temptation - a game show
the
way a relationship ought
to be - the first
manifesto
only
whole-heartedness
like
a plate of cool cherries
the
window
(akas's first short
story; appeared in his
high school magazine objective)
oneshot
- a web magazine (design
by faruk ulay)
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