Selections from Orhan Pamuk’s illustrated and personal notebooks…

For fourteen years, Pamuk has been taking notes and making drawings in small notebooks every day. On these pages, he describes and reflects on his daily life, current events, his emotions, and the challenges of the novels he is writing. Sometimes he speaks with his fictional characters, sometimes he recounts a dream or a journey, and at other times he paints landscapes or reflects on happiness. Months or even years later, he returns to a page to add new colors and words. In this way, the notebook pages become dense, rich, and unique compositions where text, colors, and shapes intertwine in a search for new meanings.

While compiling this selection, titled Distant Mountains and Memories, from thousands of pages in his notebooks, Pamuk reveals his life with complete openness, both in words and images, through a dream that holds special meaning for him.

This book will introduce readers to a lesser-known side of Pamuk—the diary-keeping artist—along with his daily life, surprising imagination, and experiences, offering insight into the world-famous writer as a human being.

“There is genius in Orhan Pamuk’s madness.”

— Umberto Eco