“A powerful and provocative debut collection” ( The New York Times Book Review ) by “a startling talent who can seemingly do anything” (Anthony Marra) that explores the lives of ordinary people in Turkey to reveal how even individual acts of resistance have extraordinary repercussions. “ I Am My Country employs many different literary styles and voices to dazzling effect.”— The Atlantic FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • AN ELECTRIC LIT AND LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Spanning decades and landscapes, from the forests along the Black Sea to the streets of Istanbul, Kenan Orhan’s ​playful stories ​conjure dreamlike worlds—of talking animals, flying houses, and omniscient prayer-callers—to ​examine humanity’s unfaltering pursuit of hope in even the darkest circumstances. A determined florist trains a neighborhood stray dog to blow up a corrupt president. A garbage collector finds banned instruments—and later, musicians—in the trash and takes them home to form a clandestine orchestra in her attic. A smuggler risks his life to bring a young woman claiming to be pregnant via immaculate conception across the border with Syria. A poor cage-maker tries to use his ability to talk to birds to woo his childhood love just before the 1955 Istanbul pogrom. These characters are united by a desperate yearning to break free from the volatile realities they face: rising authoritarianism, cultural and political turmoil, and staggering violence. Ranging from the absurd to the tenderhearted, the stories in I Am My Country illuminate the constant force amid one country’s history of rampant oppression and revolutionary progress: the impulse to survive.