Winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes, the new film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon A Time In Anatolia) is an immersive and provocative drama. Set in the picturesque and striking landscape of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, Winter Sleep focuses on a small village, half-empty, in the wintry off-season. The film follows a local celebrity, Aydin, an actor who runs a small hotel with his wife, writes a column for the local newspaper,...

From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a portrait of Istanbul by its foremost writer, revealing the melancholy that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.  
"Delightful, profound, marvelously origina.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." —The Washington Post Book World

A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic,...

On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before, not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend...

Lada Dracul seeks her younger brother Radu's help in securing the Wallachian throne, but their father, Sultan Mehmed, has sent him to sabotage Constantinople.

"A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history-- and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization:...

Hundreds of thousands of cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they've wandered in and out of people's lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich. Claiming no owners, these animals live between two worlds, neither wild nor tame, and they bring joy and purpose to those people they choose to adopt. In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to the people, allowing them to reflect on their lives...

"When the Sultan commissions a great book to celebrate his royal self and his extensive dominion, he directs Enishte Effendi to assemble a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed, and no one in the elite circle can know the full scope or nature of the project." "Panic erupts...

It is 1877, when a heartbreaking tragedy leaves Eleanora Cohen marooned in Istanbul during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. But young Eleonora, clever and engaging beyond her years, soon catches the attention of the Sultan's court.

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul-- one city, where stories and histories collide. The gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. Hughes takes us on an historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. This is the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the...

"Fanis is at the center of a dwindling yet stubbornly proud community of Rum, Greek Orthodox Christians, who have lived in Istanbul for centuries. When Daphne, the American-born niece of an old friend, arrives in the city in search of her roots, she is met with a hearty welcome. Fanis is smitten by the aloof outsider, who, despite the age difference, reminds him of the fiancée he lost in the 1955 pogrom. Kosmas, a master pastry chef on the lookout...