‘The Trojan War Museum’: Featured Fiction from Ayse Papatya Bucak
In our latest installment of featured fiction—curated by our own Carolyn Quimby—we present an excerpt from O. Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Ayse Papatya Bucak’s debut collection, The Trojan War Museum: And Other Stories, out today from W.W. Norton.
Kirkus called the book “cerebral yet high-spirited,” while Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, praised Bucak’s “remarkable, inventive, and humane debut.”
“The Gathering of Desire”
It was the age of automatons and already there was a fly made of brass, a mechanical tiger, an eight foot elephant, and a duck that swallowed a piece of grain and excreted a small pellet. There was a dancing woman and a trumpet playing man. A miniature Moscow that burned and collapsed and sprang up again.
And once there was, and once there wasn’t,
in the time when magic was mystery and science was fact,
