The City In Crimson Cloak

(Paperback)

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zgr is poor, hungry, and on the verge of a mental breakdown, with only one weapon against Rio: to write the city that has robbed her of everything. Reading the bits and pieces of zgr's unfinished eponymous novel, with its autobiographical protagonist named , zgr's story begins to emerge. Meanwhile, the narrator limns a single day of zgr's life, which is in fact her last. As zgr follows through the shanty towns, Condomble rituals, and the violence and sexuality of the streets to her own death, the narrator searches for a way to make peace with life, a route to catharsis. The two concentric novels, the borderline between the two Rio's zgr's Rio as a metaphor for death and Rio as life begin to blur. Asli Erdogans brilliantly evocative, experimental second novel was a major hit in Turkey and Europe. Now available in translation, the book does for Rio what Joyce did for Dublin.

Author Bio

One of Turkey's most challenging authors, Asli Erdogan has been a critical success both in Turkey and Europe. A former physicist who abandoned her scientific career for a literary one, Erdogan's first book, the novel The Shell Man was published in 1994. Erdogan's second novel, The City in Crimson Cloak, established her as a writer of formidable literary merit, gathering accolades abroad.

From 1998 to 2000, Erdogan, a human rights activist and former Turkish representative of PEN's Writers in Prison Committee, wrote a column for the Turkish newspaper Radikal entitled "The Others." Her articles were later collected and published as the book When a Journey Ends.