Orhan Pamuk and modernist liberalism

"Is there is a global culture today? I think there is. Its images come from movies, old and new, and from television; its sounds are rock-and-roll, rap, and heavy traffic on the street. But only the novel has the Faustian chutzpah to try to connect all the dots, to put this immense world together. Orhan Pamuk, one of the world’s great novelists, lives and works within shouting distance of Dissent. The least we can do is shout to our readers that he’s here. I don’t know him, but it’s a thrill to know he’s nearby. He spends half the year in New York, where he teaches comparative literature at Columbia, the other half in his hometown Istanbul, where he speaks truth and gets in trouble."