Author Event: Ralph Hubbell, WAITING FOR THE FEAR (with Eric Puchner)

Bird in Hand is thrilled to feature Ralph Hubbell, translator of the new classic from the New York Review of Books: Waiting for the Fear by Turkish author Oğuz Atay.
Waiting for the Fear collects short stories about people on the margins, from story peddlers to beggars, by one of Turkey's most innovative fiction writers. A giant of modern Turkish literature, Oğuz Atay remains largely untranslated into English. First published in 1975, Waiting for the Fear is Atay's only collection of short stories, praised by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk for having transformed the art of short fiction.
We're thrilled that Eric Puchner will join Ralph Hubbell in conversation to discuss the short stories and the questions of translation in the context of this exciting project.

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Ralph Hubbell is the translator of Oğuz Atay's story collection Waiting for the Fear (NYRB Classics). Other translations of his, from the Turkish, have appeared in Words Without Borders, the Markaz Review, the Dial, Asymptote, and elsewhere, while his fiction and essays have appeared in the Sun Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Tin House’s Lost & Found. He holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, where he currently works as the senior program coordinator in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Eric Puchner is the author of a new novel, Dream State, forthcoming in April 2025. His previous books include the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two collections of stories, Last Day on Earth and Music Through the Floor. His fiction and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Best American Short Stories 2012 and 2017. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.

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