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 2023. Additional television credits include The Beast in Me, Dope Thief, 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, IHate Valentine's Day, and the short film The Light. 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.

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, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Eleanor Roosevelt Lifetime Achievement Award for Bravery in Literature, and the Joan Margarit Poetry 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. Atwood’s short story collection Old Babes in the Wood was published in 2023, and her poetry collection Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961–2023 was published in 2024. Her latest work, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, was published this November.

Becky Ann Baker has appeared on television and film in Ted Lasso and Girls, for which she received Emmy nominations; 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; Holler, Jackpot!; The Girls on the Bus; Elsbeth; All Happy Families; Our Hero, Balthazar; Ella McKay; and Only Murders in the Building. 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; Barbecue at the Public Theater; and virtually in TheHomeboundProject.

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 20123.

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 Book of Extraordinary Tragedies, 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. He is co-creator of Question Mark, Ohio, and the creator of Star Witness, a seven-part serial on Electric Literature. He was a contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times,The Chicago Tribune, The Toronto Star, BOMB Magazine, The Chicago Reader,New City, and Chicago Magazine.

Maggie Siff recently completed a seven-season run as Wendy on Showtime’s Billions, for which she has received three Satellite Award nominations. She is also known for the FX series Sons of Anarchy, receiving two Critics’ Choice Award nominations, and for the role of Rachel Menken on the first season of AMC’s Mad Men (Screen Actors Guild Award nomination). Recent films include The Short History of the Long Road, A Woman/A Part, The Sweet Life, The Fifth Wave, One Percent More Humid, and Concussion. Siff is also an established theater actress; her New York theater credits include Signature Theatre’s production of Curse of the Starving Class, as well as A Lie of the Mind at the New Group, directed by Ethan Hawke, Orpheus Descending, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew with Theatre For a New Audience, and Alexis Scheer’s Breaking the Story at Second Stage.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.

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.