What Remains

By Leylâ Erbil
Translated by Alev Ersan, Amy Spangler, and Mark Wyers
Introduction by Ayten Tartici

An experimental novel-in-verse from Leylâ Erbil, the first Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Description

An experimental novel-in-verse from Leylâ Erbil, the first Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel Prize.

In this remarkable, multilayered narrative, Erbil pens an elegy to the Istanbul of eras past and all that’s been lost in its transformation. Through the eyes of a woman named Lahzen we witness the landscape shift from a vibrant multicultural hub where a young Jewish girl snaps her pencil in half to share it with her Turkish classmate to a city fractured by political violence. The sharp crack of that pencil becomes an echo in Lahzen’s life: a symbol of both rupture and communion, the sound of something shared and something lost.

From the Byzantine Empire to the twentieth-century Turkey of Erbil’s experience, What Remains searches urgently for a way to escape recurrent cycles of suffering, all while preserving hope in the smallest acts of kindness. Now available for the first time in translation, with an introduction by Ayten Tartici, What Remains is a fearless, deeply felt narrative from one of the most influential Turkish writers in recent history. 

Biographical Information

One of the most influential Turkish writers of the 20th century, Leylâ Erbil was an innovative literary stylist who tackled issues at the heart of what it means to be human, in mind and body. Erbil ventured where few writers dared to tread, turning her lens to the tides of social norms and the shaping of identities, focusing intently on emotional conflict, and plumbing the depths of history and psyche. In 2002 and 2004 Erbil was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by Turkey PEN. She died in Istanbul in 2013.

Ayten Tartici is a Turkish-born, New York-based writer. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Slate, and The Yale Review, among other venues. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, where she was awarded the John Addison Porter prize for best scholarship university-wide. She was selected as an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown and has taught literature at Columbia University. She is a 2025-2026 Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House, where she is working on a memoir that blends in cultural criticism.