When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he was honored for using his craft as a novelist to bridge a troubling gap between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East. Gloria Fisk contests this pervasive way of reading Pamuk to look skeptically at the ways Western literary cultures expand their reach around the world. Taking the Turkish novelist as a case study in that expansion, Fisk reads his post-9/11 novels in the context of their international reception to weigh the costs and benefits of valuing literature as a source of cross-cultural understanding. The result is a case study in the uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment that carry a writer across the eastern edge of Europe to his readers all over the globe.

"A provocative and necessary contribution to the field of contemporary world literature." - College Literature

"One of Fisk’s ancillary achievements lies in modeling a single-author monograph that is expansive rather than parochial, progressive and not fuddy-duddy ... If, by the end of Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, literature’s good has not been rebuilt exactly, Fisk does suggest the path towards a more modest literary criticism—a future that looks bright so long as we have scholars amongst us like Fisk who write with not only intellectual honesty but moral clarity." - Studies in the Novel

"Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still. The strength of Fisk’s argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself." - Novel: A Forum on Fiction

"Across this work Gloria Fisk examines the Orhan Pamuk case and delivers a compelling account of the state of non-Western authors and the good they are expected to do in the world with their literature.... Her stance provides her a sensitive lens through which to observe the abundant and complicated social and political aspects interwoven in Turkey’s fabric." - C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings

"Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature is a timely book, not only because it contributes to the continuing debate on world literature that has occupied literary academic circles since the 1990s but also because it sets out to uncover the immense impact of neoliberalism on academia in the United States." - Twentieth-Century Literature