Kurdish Book Club

Kurdish literature is rich, compelling, and diverse, and it should be better known.  In our Book Club we read novels as well as nonfiction, then meet to discuss them (in English).

We meet on the first Tuesday of each month, at 7pm ET via Zoom. Come join us—share your thoughts, expand your understanding, and build bonds.

To find out more or to register, write to bookclub@nykcc.org.

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Our next reading will be All Dogs Die, a novel by Cemile Sahin.

How do you live with violence and trauma? How do you cope with the threat of them recurring? These are among the urgent questions posed by Cemile Sahin’s novel—a haunting and brilliant tale of people on the edge.

The novel consists of nine episodes, all concerning different characters who all live in the same apartment building in Turkey. All have had violence and torture inflicted on them by the secret police or the army, have often been driven from their homes in acts of terror.

Each episode tells of a harrowing past and an indeterminate present as the characters struggle to describe acts of torture and displacement.

Characters often recur in different episodes as one another’s neighbors. Events will reappear, seen from a different angle. One narrator will show that another has failed to grasp an aspect of the situation.

As a multimedia visual artist, Sahin is interested in the interplay between image and text. The novel is interspersed with images that form their own commentary.

All Dogs Die seeks to express the horror of state-sponsored terror and war in words and stories. Sahin’s direct, unadorned style prevents the novel from relishing the violence it depicts. This is an important novel for its unflinching representation of actual geopolitical situations, and the enduring human suffering wrought by state-sponsored terror that extends far beyond this one place and time.

You can watch Cemile Sahin discussing All Dogs Die with journalist Julia Encke  here,

The Book Club will meet to discuss it on May 6. 

Date and time: Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at 7pm ET

Place: Zoom 

For information about the Book Club, please write to bookclub@nykcc.org.