Moving Through the World with Eyes Open

In her latest short story collection, Ayşegül Savaş considers lives lived apart.

By Angelica HankinsMarch 5, 2026

• Fiction

NO ONE IN Ayşegül Savaş’s short fiction is entirely honest with themselves. Her characters plan lavish getaways in cities full of jeweled necklaces and silk gowns, of “useless, beautiful things.” When the narrator in “Notions of the Sacred” learns that she’s pregnant, her first impulse is to buy a felt hat in peacock green. She pictures the Virgin Mother’s elusive gaze and imagines herself dissolving into the wider world: “It was early spring, and the trees were luminous with papery leaves. In the mirror I saw myself as part of this resplendent moment.” But the illusion is short-lived, unraveling, as it does in nearly every Savaş story, as soon as it’s begun. At times, her characters mull over the past, lamenting all they didn’t say, but more often, they are breathless, eager to see what lies ahead. That, for Savaş, is a kind of redemption: to move through the world with eyes open, to never stop looking.

The author’s latest short story collection, Long Distance (2025), opens with Lea, a researcher in Rome, preparing for a visit from Leo, a man she started seeing on a recent trip to California. Before he arrives, Lea leaves nothing to chance, dotting her apartment with tulips and carnations, mapping out their walks, the mystery she’ll evoke. In the emails they exchange, she composes herself with care, referencing the banks of the river, the out-of-the-way museums, “to have him see her as someone curious and passionate.” Like another of Savaş’s protagonists, who loves dating for “the anticipation, the dressing up,” Lea delights in self-invention, in the person she can summon with a few delicate strokes. She imagines eating in bed with Leo in the late afternoon, reveling in the decadence, in “the sleepy indulgence, the sheets streaked with light.”

But like anyone who dreams fervently, Lea is bound for disappointment. When Leo arrives, he’s exhausted, a small, pale version of the man she remembered. At first, the two misunderstand each other, the distance making strangers of them. When Leo falls asleep prematurely on his first night, Lea bemoans “her smooth, soft legs, her lace underwear, now wasted.”

There’s a disconnect in these stories, as in life, between the way one would like to be seen and the drudgery of the everyday. Consider the narrator in “Future Selves,” who visits her younger cousin in college, someone who wanted “to live as [the narrator] did, in a beautiful city.” The attention stirs her, seeing herself through her cousin’s eyes, a feeling that will soon peter out. In “Twirl,” the protagonist is on an unexceptional date when she meets an older Turkish woman, Zerrin, whom she admires, vaguely and persistently. Under Zerrin’s gaze, she reimagines herself as an independent woman in the city, living freely. In her company, the central character embellishes her love life, her comings and goings. She relishes the secrecy, her world for a moment immaculate, her conscience clear.

Later, it dawns on the narrator that Zerrin had just been humoring her: “Without her eager audience, my youth felt charmless. It was already spent.” Here and elsewhere, Savaş treats her subjects tenderly, and without pity. Briskly plotted, her stories have no room for despair. If the characters acknowledge their faults, they do so swiftly. At one point in Lea and Leo’s tryst, we learn that “they went home. They made risotto. They made love. Leo packed his suitcase.” It’s that propulsion, by turns detached and relentless, that drives these stories: a desire to see the world, to luxuriate in it, without ever losing time.

This alacrity runs through the collection. The characters here are gestured at, lightly, obliquely, as if seen from afar. One is “tall and radiant. She wore high-waisted trousers and vests and smiled at everyone as if she were a movie star.” Another flirts with a young waiter, and “very quickly, the attention was reciprocated.” We never learn what these figures look like—the color of their eyes, the cut of their hair—and yet we have everything we need to know. They’re the kind of women who get what they want—a life of sublimity, of flourishes at every turn. Consider the green mosaic floors and the “glistening croissants” at a bistro in Paris, the terra-cotta tiles and brass claws of an antique bed. Lea and Leo dine on “jam-filled cornetti” and “heaping cups of gelato.” The narrators here are always looking, seeking out the exuberant, the peculiar: the landlord’s pocket embroidered with his initials, a rock climber “curiously like an insect.”

Savaş is attentive to those curiosities, to the inner workings of her characters. When Amina, a new mother in “Marseille,” sets out on a trip with old friends, she isn’t thrilled. Rather, she feels “as if she were putting on a coat she hadn’t worn in a long time, whose shape and texture she remembered immediately.” The narrators find themselves let down, simply and often, their disappointment registered softly. One of the most poignant passages in the collection comes on the second day of Leo’s visit, when the city is soaked: “There was nothing romantic about Rome on a rainy day—not when you hadn’t yet seen it enough in bright light. The city took time to get used to. You had to learn to love it without makeup, puffy-faced.” Like a begrudging tourist, these characters are forced to consider their lives in the rain-drenched, unflattering light.

The author comes into her own when she steps back and savors the richness of a scene, like a salted caramel on the tongue. Take a striking passage from Savaş’s debut novel Walking on the Ceiling (2019), when a girl, careful to not upset her mother, tiptoes through the house silently, like peeling the “cloth stuck to a scar.” Nothing has time to stick in these stories. Perpetually late, the protagonists are forever racing somewhere, to meet their parents for dinner, to catch a flight. In this constrained world, they fix their gazes backward, looking at lives spent, and wasted.

The story of Amina, on a sojourn in Southern France, turns on the realization—the conviction—that she is suddenly old, a mere fixture amid the “girls in high heels, shaky on their legs.” Savaş thrills to those momentary dips in pleasure, the melody sliding into a minor key. “I am drawn to the idea of a reunion in a charming place,” she told The New Yorker last year, “and how that charm can suddenly tip.” The narrative tips in “Freedom to Move” when a teenage girl with a “tilt toward desire, toward freedom,” brings to mind the narrator’s own dreams, years ago: “I had wished only to be off, to be free, to start my life elsewhere.” To be young, the stories imply, is to be hopeful, to see the world in all its tantalizing beauty. There’s an independence of mind inherent in youth, a desire to be oneself, whoever that might be. Leyla in “The Room” is content to take a dull tutoring job, to eat canned sardines, if it means she can live in Paris, “a beautiful place where she can close the door and be alone.”

It’s when they’re alone that these characters can see themselves. In “The Guest,” a young man has just proposed to Nehla. On a visit to her family’s village in Turkey, he feels restless, at a remove from his fiancée and himself. He returns to a bookstore in Istanbul that he hasn’t visited in years. A panel discussion is underway, and he spots an old flame. He considers, for a moment, Nehla and her family: “I felt a pang—of loss, perhaps, or impossibility—imagining just how out of place they would be in such a setting.” He is torn silently, evocatively, between the man he was, someone who could float weightlessly here and there, and the new life to which he’s tethered. When Nehla phones him later that night, he doesn’t take the call, deciding instead to spend the evening with old friends. It’s reminiscent of a scene in Savaş’s 2021 novel White on White, when Pascal visits his girlfriend’s family for the first time and is horribly on edge, “fearful as a cat.” There’s nothing climactic about these interludes; they would pass unnoticed in another story. But in Savaş’s hands, they’re brought out tacitly, discreetly, like the thoughts that bristle at the edge of consciousness.

There’s much to bristle at in Savaş’s fiction. The tension in her prose, as she noted in a 2019 interview with BOMB, arises “from huge reserves of affection that are unarticulated, characters who don’t know what to do with their feelings.” Instead, they play games (as children to avoid punishment, as adults on interminable dates); they are greedy (resenting their partners, clinging to friends). More often than not, they leave things unsaid. When the narrator in “The Room” learns that an older woman’s husband is having an affair, she doesn’t comfort her; rather, she exchanges the usual pleasantries and walks away. The housekeeper in “Freedom to Move” pleads with the narrator for time off to visit her family; the narrator nods but never broaches the subject with her father, who will make the final decision, reasoning that she “didn’t want to spoil [their] short time together.” Reality here seems too burdensome. “I was leaving in a few days,” the narrator thinks, “free of responsibilities.”

But the greatest of these character flaws, for Savaş, is an ingrained myopia, a failure to see the other, and the wider world. In “Twirl,” the narrator tires of her inept dates. “I found them all so childish,” she sighs, “these grown men who couldn’t see beyond themselves, who were incapable of seduction.” To be a child is to fixate on one’s needs at the expense of all else, to see everything as an extension of the self. Yet the allure of relationships is the possibility of finding someone different, a person who sees broadly, who considers new perspectives. It’s those rare and extraordinary people with whom we can be ourselves. Partway through “Layover,” the niceties fall away between childhood friends Lara and Selin, and they are back in “their old rhythm.” It’s that rhythm that the characters in these stories try and fail to find.

At one point in “Freedom to Move,” the housekeeper toasts her daughter, whose extended family lives overseas, and who wants, above all, to escape. But the life she’s after isn’t out of reach. It doesn’t exist, as the collection is titled, at a “long distance,” but faintly, strikingly, in the here and now. She has only to look closely to live in her world with abandon. Her mother raises a glass to a future of splendor, of wonders to be seen, a future where “we don’t have to dream of things far away.”