From an NPR book review:
That’s the kind of astonishing illumination you’ll find in The Trojan War Museum, Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s debut story collection. These are stories that reflect the author’s Turkish heritage and a curiosity about our human search for meaning as profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music. They beguile and illuminate with narratives about yearning and desire, circumstance and courage, resilience and discovery. Reading them, while the reading lasts, replaces seeing.
I found myself lingering as I read — Bucak’s prose has a sort of musical cadence to it; these are fables about enchantment, myth and actual history. Her subjects — schoolgirls stuck in the debris of a disaster, an art collector’s exotic oeuvre, a Trojan War Museum imagined and re-imagined by Zeus and his fellow deities, a widow’s chess match with her dead husband’s ghost — occupy a dreamscape of surprising encounters, art history, and Turkish culture. Each story is a vignette that has at its core a re-weaving of human relationships.
To read more click on the following link: https://www.npr.org/2019/08/22/753170034/the-trojan-war-museum-is-a-gorgeous-gallery-of-dreams

This definitive companion for cycling enthusiasts showcases 200 of North, Central and South America’s best and most celebrated routes, from epic adventures off the beaten path to shorter urban rides. Go bikepacking in Baja, road riding in Colombia, mountain biking in Canada and gravel riding in Pennsylvania.
At the center of the attack on those of us born between 1946 and 1964, days when the U.S. birth rate was extraordinarily high, is our supposed radical individualism. Its roots are said to be found in the excesses of the 1960s, a decade for which “boomers have become fall guys.”
When Diana, Princess of Wales, attended the Met’s Costume Institute Gala in 1996, a black-tie-clad Mr. Barelli was at her side. “I wasn’t nervous, but the pressure!” he said. “You don’t want anything to go wrong.” The princess had one request: that he keep an eye on the black lace shoulder straps of her midnight blue Dior dress and adjust them if they slipped. “I almost told her: ‘Yeah, right, I have to touch your dress.’ That’s all I have to do. I think my wife would be a little upset,” he recalled. There was no wardrobe malfunction and the evening went off without a hitch, although Mr. Barelli remembers security concerns putting a damper on the fun-loving princess. “We couldn’t let her dance,” he said.
