One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories is Burcu Karahan’s translation and compilation of a collection of erotic short stories and illustrations. The original series was published in sixteen weekly editions during 1923 and 1924 by Istanbul’s Amedi Publishing House. The stories and their complementary illustrations were all published either anonymously or pseudonymously. Karahan, a specialist in late Ottoman literature and literary translation, has produced an engaging English rendering of the Ottoman Turkish stories accompanied by an historical introduction.
Karahan’s compilation reproduces the serial nature of the original stories, with each of the sixteen issues represented by a chapter comprised of between three and five stories with illustrations and each issue covering twenty-four pages. Karahan’s translation makes the text accessible through its fluid and colloquial rendering of Ottoman Turkish. By maintaining terms in the original vocabulary and capturing the voice and style of the stories in her translation, Karahan invites the reader into the collection’s place and time, while making the themes accessible to the contemporary English reader.
In her introduction to the collection, Karahan situates the stories within the landscape of late Ottoman erotic fiction. She makes a powerful argument for the avant garde aspects of these stories within this genre, emphasizing how this collection’s depiction of women’s social and sexual roles departs from the narrower constraints of earlier works in the genre. Karahan convincingly argues that One Thousand and One Kisses uniquely depicts female characters inhabiting the urban landscape of school, work, home, and public space in a variety of ways, prioritizing their desires and taking aim at normative social practices and gender roles.
Some of the stories are more developed than others in terms of length, narrative, characterization, and detail. For example, the stories in Issue Three explore infidelity, widowhood, and the machinations of an interventionist mother-in-law, developing characters and plot lines over longer-form stories. Issue Nine, by contrast, comprises one longer story about a school girl’s “pussy cat” and three very short stories that get straight to the point of seduction with few overtures. Such unevenness reminds us that the primary point of these stories was entertainment.
Karahan’s introduction makes claims about the reception and readership of the originally published series that appear, in the absence of references, to be based on speculation. For example, Karahan claims that the series “readily found an audience,” asserts that women were reading the series alongside men, and emphasizes the popularity of the series without providing sources for these statements (p. xvii). Karahan’s assertions are certainly plausible and the absence of concrete information about reception does not undermine the literary value of the compilation. However, more specific information about the stories’ reception and circulation, if available, would provide a stronger basis for understanding the social impact of the original publication and the parameters of their potential use as a primary source for analyzing gender, sexuality, and society in the late Ottoman Empire.
Furthermore, Karahan observes that it remains unclear who wrote these stories and how many of them may have been translations from French or English, raising the question of the extent to which they may or may not have reflected prevailing attitudes in the late Ottoman period. Nevertheless, the chapters are packed with thematic elements that, with careful consideration of methodology, could lend well to a variety of possible analytical approaches. For instance, the stories offer hints about prevailing archetypes of masculinity and femininity, including ideal notions of gender and sexuality. The stories could also offer insights into contemporary stereotypes about marriage and other varieties of romantic and familial relationships, as well as perspectives on what may have been common repertoires of sexual fantasy in the late Ottoman period.
Karahan emphasizes female agency as a central theme of the collection: “the women of One Thousand and One Kisses are assertively cast as agents of desire” (p. xxiv). She continues,
Beyond their appeal as escapist entertainment, these stories also offered something more radical: they provided a space for women to exist without the usual social constraints. Within the pages of One Thousand and One Kisses, women could express desire without shame, navigate Istanbul’s urban modernity with wit and autonomy, and challenge the moralizing codes that defined so much of novels of the time. They invited readers, especially women readers, to imagine alternative ways of being, not dictated by patriarchy or propriety but shaped by pleasure, humor, and freedom (p. xviii).
Indeed, the stories present a wide range of female characters; however, without knowing the identities and perspectives of the stories’ authors, the question remains whether these depictions of women are somehow a product of the male gaze. Do these stories teach us something specific about female sexuality, or do they potentially produce a type of role reversal based on existing gender norms? Karahan addresses this question convincingly, arguing that while some of the stories “miss the mark,” the collection overall centers and celebrates a spectrum of female sexualities (p. xxviii). However, this point remains methodologically relevant for those considering using the stories as a primary source for late Ottoman sexualities and gender roles.
This collection joins other translations of late Ottoman literary works by Karahan, Iclal Vanwesenbeek, and Melih Levi that explore gender, sexuality, and society. Given limited source materials available in English on these topics, such works inevitably bear the burden of acting not only as representations of the genre, but also as potential primary sources for scholars and students. Scholarly and literary works that address topics of gender and sexuality in the Global South broadly, and in the Middle East in particular, must be attentive to the potential of reinforcing liberal narratives of agency that use the lack of gender and sexual freedom for women and queer individuals as cover for imperial interventions that threaten the physical bodies of these very people in the name of their liberation.
Deftly navigating this fraught terrain, Karahan contextualizes her discussion of agency within a broader analysis of how late Ottoman modernity involved the normalization of heterosexual monogamous marriage and other gender and family norms. Karahan also notes the broader context of patriarchy and inequality in which women operated in the late Ottoman Empire. She observes how control over gender and sexuality was a site of contested political and social projects and how erotic literature offered an avenue to challenge such norms.
Overall, Karahan’s translation is a valuable contribution to the growing corpus of Ottoman literature in English translation. These works constitute both enjoyable reading and primary sources on aspects of late Ottoman society that are otherwise difficult to study with the available sources. Readers, including specialists, students, and a general audience interested in the period, will appreciate the stories for their considerable entertainment value and the unique place they occupy in the late Ottoman literary canon.
