The New Yorker recently called this the summer of pocket reads, as if to assure us that undertaking ambitious literary investigations and obsessively annotating a copy of The Odyssey is not the only way to spend your summer vacations. Pocket reads, as you may have figured, are tiny paperbacks that you can easily carry in your handbag and perhaps even hope to finish in the duration of a long flight.
In her seven-year-long publishing career, Turkish-born Ayşegül Savaş has shown she’s a master of the genre. Her books rarely cross the 200-page mark—whether it’s her debut Walking on the Ceiling (2019), which comprises 72 short chapters that feel like a walk in the park (one of them is 40 words long), or her most popular work yet, The Anthropologists (2024), which was handpicked as one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2024 and is merely 179 pages.
So, what’s so special about Long Distance?
If you still have The Anthropologists on your TBR, Long Distance (2025), a selection of 13 short stories, is a great introduction to Savaş’s unique style of storytelling and her disarmingly simple prose. Each story captures what it is to be creative, young, and kind of clueless, through the voice of a footloose creative lead (most often female), who is often seen wandering European cities, finding new love, catching up with friends at cafes, visiting dimly lit bars, renting apartments, and navigating long-distance relationships.
The stories may be set in Rome or Marseille, but the conversations and themes are universal. It’s evident that Savaş is an Anthropology major—her richly observed narrative captures the mundane happenings of life in a way that anyone in their twenties and thirties still trying to figure things out is likely to find very, very relatable.
Why should I pick it up?
A remarkably compact collection of short stories, Long Distance is the kind of book that is perfect for anyone going through a reading slump. Savaş has this ability to write about ordinary lives in the most magical way. If you like the deceptively philosophical wanderings of Rachel Cusk and the clinical precision of Katie Kitamura, Savaş is the perfect bridge between the two. You can brisk-read her simple prose about lives where nothing really happens and take in her seemingly lo-fi writing that stays with you for days.
About the author
Ayşegül Savaş is an Istanbul-born author and writer, who grew up across Turkey, Denmark, and England, went to university in the US, and now lives in Paris with her husband and two-year-old child. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, and has been translated into 12 languages. Besides this short story collection, she has written novels like Walking on the Ceiling (2019), White on White (2021), and The Anthropologists (2024), which was handpicked as one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2024. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Wilderness (2024), a postpartum read that closely looks at the first 40 days of motherhood.
