To the Rescue

Sait Faik Abasıyanık (1906 - 1954) was born in Adapazarim, Turkey. He wrote twelve books of short stories, two novels, and a book of poetry, and is considered one of the greatest Turkish writers of the 20th century. His collections, including Luzumsuz Adam, Semaver, and Kayip Araniyor - 100 Temel Eser, celebrate the natural world, and many of his stories are loosely autobiographical and deal with his frustration with social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the slow but steady ethnic cleansing of his city. The Sait Faik Short Story Award, created in 1955, is given annually to the best collection of short stories in Turkey.

Amir Arison finished his nearly decade-long run as Aram Mojtabai on The Blacklist in July. Additional television credits include Billions, Bull, Ramy, Girls, Homeland, American Horror Story, H+,Law & Order: SVU, The Mentalist, and the hit Web series Blue. His film credits include Before the Sun Explodes, 20 weeks, Jane Wants a Boyfriend, Big Words, The Visitor, Vamps, and IHate Valentine's Day. Onstage, he has performed in The Muscles in Our Toes with Labyrinth Theater Company; New York Theater Workshop's productions of Aftermath and Christopher Durang's Why Torture Is Wrong, and The People Who Love Them; Love's Labour's Lost with the Royal Shakespeare Company; Queens Boulevard (the musical) at the Signature Theater; Waterwell’s Hamlet at the Sheen center for Thought and Culture; and Omnium Gatherum at the Variety Arts Theatre. In 2022, Arison won a Theatre World award for his performance in The Kite Runner on Broadway. He will appear in the upcoming Apple TV miniseries Sinking Spring.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade. Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, two Booker Prizes, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Atwood’s latest short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, was released in 2023.

Becky Ann Baker has appeared on television and film in Girls and Ted Lasso for which she received Emmy nominations, The Resort, The Good Fight, Freaks and Geeks, Kings, The Good Wife, The Blacklist, Big Little Lies, Brockmire, Younger, Hunters, Little Voice, New Amsterdam, Billions, A Simple Plan, Lorenzo’s Oil, Sabrina, Two Weeks Notice, Nights in Rodanthe, Starbright, The Half of It, and Holler. She has performed on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, A Streetcar Named Desire, Titanic, Assassins, All My Sons, and Good People. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in Suddenly Last Summer at the Roundabout Theatre Company; Comedy of Errors, Othello, and Two Gentlemen of Verona at the New York Shakespeare Festival; Durang, Durang at the Manhattan Theatre Club; and Barbecue at the Public Theater, and virtually in TheHomeboundProject. Baker can currently be seen in Starbright and All Happy Families. Upcoming projects include The Girls on the Bus and Grand Death Lotto.

Alexander Dawe co-translated Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s collection of short stories, A Useless Man, and The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. He received the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2023.

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, and senior lecturer at Warwick University, and the president of the English PEN. She has translated five books by Orhan Pamuk, Fethiye Cetin’s My Grandmother, and, with Alexander Dawe, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute.

Joe Meno is a playwright, fiction writer, and music journalist who lives in Chicago. He is the author of 10 novels, including Between Everything and Nothing,Marvel and a Wander, Office Girl,The Great Perhaps, Hairstyles of the Damned, and Tender as Hellfire. His short story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize, his short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, One Story, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, and broadcast on NPR. Meno was a contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine, and his latest novel is Book of Extraordinary Tragedies.

Maggie Siff is best known for her roles as Wendy Rhoades in Showtime's Billions, Tara Knowles on the FX series Sons of Anarchy, and Rachel Menken on Mad Men. Her film credits include A Woman, A Part; The 5th Wave; Concussion; Leaves of Grass; Push; One Percent More Humid; and The Short History of the Long Road. Siff has voiced such characters as Polly Platt on the podcast series You Must Remember This and Edith Carow Roosevelt on Crowded Hours. On stage, she has appeared with Theatre for a New Audience in Orpheus Descending, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing; at The Geffen Playhouse in The Escort; at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in Dollhouse, for which she received a Jefferson Award nomination; with the Signature Theatre in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class; and in Ethan Hawke’s revival of A Lie of the Mind with the New Group. Siff earned an MFA from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.

CREDITS

“The Silk Handkerchief” by Sait Faik Abasıyanık, from A Useless Man (Archipelago Books, 2014). English translation copyright © Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, 2014. Used by permission of Archipelago Books.

“Animal Hospital” by Joe Meno, from Washington Square Review (Winter/Spring 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Joe Meno. Used by permission of the author.

“First Aid” by Margaret Atwood and collected in Old Babes in the Wood (Doubleday, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of the author.