Orhan Pamuk is widely regarded as a paragon of the contemporary global writer. The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 as well as a host of other international honors and awards, his novels have sold over 13 million copies worldwide, have been translated into sixtythree languages, and have been met with universal critical acclaim. It is what has been accentuated as Pamuk's cosmopolitan, secular-liberal literary stance on themes including the East / West encounter, the history of the Ottoman Empire, the cultural politics of Islam in Turkey up to the present day, authoritarianism and repression there, the figure of the writer or artist, the social value of literature and the arts, and so forth that the global literary industry has chosen most consistently to celebrate in its framing of the author and his work. This impression of Pamuk is reinforced by what has been taken as the characteristic style in which his novels are written. Writing for the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz characterizes this as “the Esperanto of international literary fiction,” a “playful postmodernism” that mixes genres and pays homage to Western models like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Jorge Luis Borges.