Today we are hosting one of the sharpest pens when it comes to capturing modern humanity’s painful, absurd, and sometimes terrifying relationship with the city: Hakan Bıçakcı, and his latest story collection Geçici Manzara (“Temporary Landscape”), newly arrived on shelves under the İletişim Yayınları imprint.
Published in November 2025, this 200-page work leads us along that thin line where reality bends, right in the middle of concrete, alarms, and never-ending meetings.
The City, Anxiety, and the Anatomy of Strangeness
Geçici Manzara gathers the freshest examples of the weird literature that has become Bıçakcı’s trademark. The world we encounter in the book is filled with alarms no one pays attention to, insects that need medicating, and crooked floors.
While narrating people struggling to breathe under the concrete siege of the city—and the animals that wander inside and outside of them—Bıçakcı shows how the everyday can suddenly turn uncanny. Waking up one morning to find your view has changed, being unable to interpret your dreams, or watching a seemingly trivial nosebleed swell into massive anxiety… All of it forms part of this temporary yet deeply unsettling landscape.
A Taste from the Book: “Legendary November” and Urban Melancholy
Hakan Bıçakcı embeds his social critique so seamlessly into the most ordinary moments that you can practically feel the hazy air of the metro in your lungs:
❝ “It was Legendary November, and the day was Magnificent Friday. Yet almost no one seemed to fall for the calculated euphoria flashing on the meaningless, colorful advertising boards. The inside of the metro resembled a funeral home. A crowd of people in dark coats, with equally unhappy faces and equally crooked postures, had each drifted off into their separate voids.” ❞
Don’t these lines capture—with brutal precision—the chasm between the manufactured “joy of consumption” in the modern world and the individual’s inner emptiness?
Why You Should Read It
Hakan Bıçakcı is not merely a storyteller; he is an observer who takes an X-ray of the city’s psychology. If you
- enjoy discovering the hidden unease lurking inside everyday life,
- are drawn to writers who mock the absurdity of urban existence while quietly breaking your heart,
- have missed the distinctive, slightly dark, yet utterly compelling atmosphere of strange fiction,
then Geçici Manzara will be one of the best reading choices for the winter of 2026. Bıçakcı offers us a new, strange, and—for now—fresh landscape emerging from acid rain and piles of concrete.
Wishing you joyful and full-of-discovery reading!
