The Trojan War Museum — Ayse Papatya Bucak

Short-listed for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection


“As profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music.” -- Marcela Davison Avilés, NPR

In Ayse Papatya Bucak's dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount gas explosions and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating, and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war. A joy and a provocation, Bucak's stories confront the nature of memory with humor and myth, performance and authenticity.