The Trojan War Museum
and Other Stories
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE SPOTLIGHT AWARD
short-listed for PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
“[These] stories are music. They beguile and illuminate…” —Marcela Davison Aviles, for NPR Books
“Bucak’s luminous debut taps folklore and real life to flesh out complex characters with an agile, inventive hand.” — O Magazine
“One of the best and most surprising collections I've read in a long time. This is a wonder cabinet of stories, every story so singular and marvelous that I spent a long time after each, wanting to linger in the space it had created.” —Kelly Link
“This is a truly lovely, truly surprising book. Ayşe Papatya Bucak's stories are narratively precise, and they are also beautiful vignettes on human culture, deftly probing the fissures and pressure points of history. This collection absolutely glows with life.” —Lydia Kiesling
“What a beautiful, wildly imagined book. The Trojan War Museum gives us stories with branching paths, and they resemble fairy tales, historical accounts, news reports, and dreams. This is fiction of great originality and great delight.” —Joan Silber
“Ayşe Papatya Bucak shares with Jhumpa Lahiri the gift of fusing distinctive subject matter with an unusually restrained and elegant voice. This marvelous debut collection is truly rare in its range and depth, its deft mastery of history and myth, and its fearless story-telling.” —Andrea Barrett
“Bucak's stories are wide-ranging and capacious, formally playful, and moving. They speak on behalf of women who are subject to fate and the tides of history. They speak of overcoming, of falling prey, of overcoming again. They convey history's full force, but also the individual's willfulness, cunning, and compassion. These stories are also entirely contemporary and unique.” —Joshua Ferris
“If these 10 short stories took a DNA test, they’d find out they were part myth, part postmodern tale, part encyclopedia entry, part Donald Barthelme.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Bucak’s remarkable, inventive, and humane debut marks her as a writer to watch.” —Publishers Weekly
FOR SALE EVERYWHERE BOOKS ARE SOLD
Including Books & Books, W.W. Norton, and Bookshop.org
I was born in Istanbul, Turkey—to an American mother and a Turkish father—but spent most of my childhood in Havertown, PA, just outside of Philadelphia. My BA is from Princeton University and my MFA from Arizona State University. You can find my stories and essays in a variety of journals, including One Story, Guernica, Bomb, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, The Iowa Review, and Brevity. In 2019, Norton published my short story collection The Trojan War Museum. Two of the included stories were chosen for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. A lot of my work has been written at residencies, including Yaddo, Studios of Key West, Willapa Bay AIR, Hedgebrook, the Betsy Hotel, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. I am an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, and am a contributing editor for the journal Copper Nickel.
INTERVIEWS:
One-Story excerpt and interview (with Patrick Ryan )
One-Story Debutante Ball interview (with Talia Aharoni)
Between the Covers (David Naimon) podcast
The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan podcast
Fiction Writers Review (with Natalie Rowland)
In Conversation with Dean Horswell podcast
Aster(ix) (with Joshua Graber)
Superstition Review (with Devyn Carmen)
Fall for the Book podcast (with Kara Oakleaf and Suzy Rigdon)
animation by Devin Bucak
SELECTED WORK
Short Stories:
excerpt from “The Gathering of Desire”
“Little Sister and Emineh” (with Jstor access)
“An Ottoman’s Arabesque” (with Jstor access)
“Once There Was Once There Wasn’t” (with Jstor access)
Essays:
“How to Be Half Mixed Everything Both Sort Of”
“An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work”
“Three Things I Have Never told Anyone”
“8 Questions You Would Ask Me If I Told You My Name”
“The History of Girls: Part II”
“Studies for a Drawing in Red”
On Writing:
“Redefining Ornament: An Argument for the (Seemingly) Inessential”
“Person Place or Thing: Characterizing Setting”
On “An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me…”
Favorites:
“Unknown Costs” by Wilson MacConnachie Sims
“The Bank of Paradise” by Monique McIntosh
“Outside the Raft” by Dantiel Moniz
“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” by Alexander Chee
“Travels with the Snow Queen” by Kelly Link
“Other Types of Poison” by Rebecca Makkai
“The World, The Flesh, and the Devil” by Pinckney Benedict
“The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Dogs Go Wolf” by Lauren Groff
“The Invasion from Outer Space,” “History of a Disturbance,” and “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” by Steven Millhauser
“Why Were They Throwing Bricks?” by Jenny Zhang
“The Hunter’s Wife” by Anthony Doerr
“The Swan as Metaphor for Love” by Amelia Gray
“You Are the Second Person” by Kiese Laymon
“Thirty-One Tiny Failures and One Labyrinth: On Parenting and Writing” by Oliver de la Paz
“Pelagia, Holy Fool” by Melissa Pritchard
“Stranger in the Village” by Phoebe Boswell
“Parakeets” by Kevin Brockmeier
“Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
“The Problem with Writing About Florida” by Kristen Arnett
“How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell
“The Governesses” by Anne Serre (trans. Mark Hutchinson)
“Once There Was and Once There Wasn’t: The Story of P” by Sara Deniz Akant
“Rumple. Stilt. And Skin” by Sabrina Orah Mark
“The Moon Fairy” by Sofia Samatar
“A Kiss on the Forehead” by Maria Tsvetaeva
“The Mushroom Queen” by Liz Ziemska
“If My Mother Were a Poet” by Michael J. Pagan
“Let’s Play Dead” by Senaa Ahmad
EVENTS
April 11-13, 2024, Calvin Center Festival for Faith and Writing, events tba
March 6, 2024, 7:30 - 9:00 p.m., Columbia University School of the Arts, lecture
July 28, 2023, 2:45-4:00 Virtual, Craft lecture. One Story Summer Conference. tickets for sale here: https://one-story.com/product/summer-lecture-series/
Reading, Broward College, Springfest, March 21-23, 2023. Full schedule here.
Fiction Fellow, August 17-27, 2022, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ripton, VT
July 21, 2022, Craft lecture, One Story Summer Conference
March 1, 2022, Starry Nights Reading, Honors College Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL
Fiction Fellow, July 20-August 1, 2021, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Sewanee, TN
March 25, 2021, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Good Thunder Reading Series, Mankato, MN (virtual)
March 11, 2021, George Mason University, Reading (virtual)
February 10, 2021, 1:30 p.m., Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, FL (in person and virtual)
July 22, 2020 Bluegrass Writers Studio, Eastern Kentucky University (virtual)
April 30, 2020, One Story Literary Debutante Ball, Roulette, Brooklyn, NY (postponed due to Covid-19)
April 29, 2020, Greenlight Books, One Story Reading, Brooklyn, NY (postponed due to Covid-19)
March 7, 2020, AWP Offsite, Guernica, Rumpus and The Atlas Review Reading, 7=9 p.m., Bar America, San Antonio, TX (canceled due to Covid-19)
February 24, 2020 Key West Library Lecture Series, 7:00 p.m., Tropic Cinema, Key West, FL
February 13, 2020 Arizona State University, Stellar Alumni Reading Series, Tempe, AZ
January 8, 2020 Books & Books, Suniland, Pinecrest, FL
December 10, 2019 6:00 pm, Books & Books @ Studios of Key West, Key West, FL
November 23-24, 2019 Miami Book Fair, Miami, FL
September 16, 2019, University of Colorado, Denver
September 12, 2019, 7:00 pm, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL
September 7, 2019 Slice Literary Conference, St Francis College, Brooklyn
Wednesday August 21, 2019 8:00 p.m., Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL
My writing is represented by Julie Barer of The Book Group
You can contact me at pbucak at fau dot edu