In Orhan Pamuk’s preface to Other Colors: Essays and a Story (translated by Maureen Freely; Knopf) he confesses that he shelters “a greedy and implacable graphomaniac inside me—a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words—and . . . to make him happy I need to keep writing.” Other Colors is Pamuk’s first book since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. It is a miscellany of seventy-three pieces of varying length and uncertain provenance, supplemented by one short story, an extended interview (from the Paris Review), and the complete text of “My Father’s Suitcase,” Pamuk’s Nobel lecture. This is an absorbing if uneven collection, one that gives readers an opportunity to see through Pamuk’s eyes as he looks outward from—as well as inward at—modern Istanbul, the fascinating metropolis that acts as a hinge connecting the Western and Islamic worlds. I suspect that some of the material in Other Colors would never have seen the inside of hard covers if not for the marketing clout of the Nobel Prize. This might serve as invaluable career advice to other graphomaniacs: hang on to everything you ever write, against the day that representatives of the Swedish Academy come knocking on your door with a small parade of publishers trailing behind them.