Long Distance, the first short story collection and fifth book by Ayşegül Savaş, explores anew many of the central concerns and questions of her previous works: loss, immigration, the pain of distance, the comfort of distance, motherhood, not-motherhood, friendship, grief, care. Each of the thirteen stories takes a microscope to these concerns, spinning them around while simultaneously zooming in and panning out. In “Layover,” two childhood friends meet for a short coffee in Paris, their worn relationship taking on a different shape over sips while the protagonist, in classic Savaş fashion, is “weighing and measuring kindness.” It’s this keen eye for weights and measures that draws the collection tightly with Savaş’s other work: always, the characters are shifting subtly in their perceptions of one another. The same can be said of “Notions of the Sacred,” where two women connect over their pregnancies and later disconnect when one’s “misfortune repulse[s]” the other. The allegiance and alliance between the two women change continuously throughout the short story, depicting a truth about inequity and jealousy in even close friendships. The culmination of the collection is what a reader familiar with Savaş would expect: wonderful little portraits of life that are examined with incision yet still given room to breathe and surprise. It’s a perfect contribution to her incisive yet tender body of work.
“Future Selves,” the tenth story in the collection, is narrated by a woman who is apartment hunting with her husband. If you are familiar with Savaş’s most recent novel, The Anthropologists, this couple might seem familiar, like old friends. The narrator observes that the process of searching for an apartment is “an act of imaginary acrobatics” wherein she and her husband try to “launch [themselves] forward with only a guess at where [they] wanted to land.” Will they take the small yet charming eighteenth-century apartment? The loft in the old factory? Something more practical? At issue is the whole of life–or so it seems to the narrator.
Savaş’s fascination with how space and place inform and dictate our lives ranges from the small (which street? which bar on which block?) to the large (what city? what continent?). The result is a consciousness of detail that pervades throughout the entire short story.
In “Future Selves,” all is amorphous, open to possibility, to some impending determination that is both within the control of the narrator and her husband and also completely malleable by externality. The small yet charming eighteenth-century apartment is “ideal for a couple who received no guests and had no children.” Thus, the space holds the possibility of dictating the future–or not. To the narrator, this expansiveness is simultaneously enticing and frightening.
She finds a certain comfort in visiting her younger cousin, Tara, who attends University nearby. Tara and her “gang” of friends take the narrator to a Halloween weekend college party, and consider her to be “cool,” someone who “has direction in life” and “creative footing.” At a group dinner, the narrator’s treat, Tara and the gang discuss their own future selves: perhaps living on the southern coast and taking morning swims or the western coast watching crashing waves or maybe another country altogether or living in a romantic city working on a book. The entire gang, save Simon, a quiet and shy figure, have big dreams and plans that are expressed with an enviable earnestness. Later, the narrator reflects on how, when younger, she too, “talked with certainty about all the things [she’d] do in the future—the wildly different projects that would somehow all materialize—as if [she] had already attained them without even trying.” The reiterative nature of life is on display here, as is the always-distance between the ideal and the real. The narrator comfortably (and from a distance) reflects on her younger self’s naivete without acknowledging that she’s still in possession of it, only it’s mutated into an obsession with an apartment hunt, with what a certain space will determine about her life. Savaş embraces the irony.
Eventually, the narrator and her husband settle on an apartment “on an unremarkable street, in a modern building without any flourishes.” They are happy with their decision, even if aware of what its practicality may convey about them, about the direction of their lives. It is around this same time that the narrator learns Simon had disappeared, leaving behind a note saying he couldn’t find a place for himself in the world and that “all around him . . . were people who knew what they wanted, where they belonged.” The narrator worries for Simon and her cousin, but also for herself, that Simon’s disappearance might cause a rift between her and Tara and subsequently the “inevitabl[e] expir[ation]” of Tara’s admiration for her and her life. Rather than share these concerns with her husband, the narrator instead decides only to recount the story of Simon, of her “aware[ness] that the lives of strangers appeared improbable only because they were seen from a distance.” Here, the narrator, like Simon, hides her anxiety about the future; and, in doing so, continues to make her future life out of both comfort and worry.
“Twirl,” the last story in the collection, starts at a wine bar. The narrator is waiting for a date to arrive (who texted that he’d be a half hour late), when she overhears two women speaking Turkish, her native tongue, which she infrequently hears in this city. She stays around to listen and days later encounters one of the women, Zerrin, at an expensive organic grocery. Zerrin, older than the narrator and “neat and harmonious,” is also from Istanbul and the two become quick friends; there is an “instant familiarity, like an obligation,” between them. This relationship between familiarity and obligation is well-explored throughout Long Distance: closeness of any kind–linguistic, nationalistic, familial, proximite–requires something more human. This can be wonderful, this can be exhausting.
“Twirl,” aware of the form its title invokes, swivels back and forth between the narrator’s experience online dating (yes, those terrible apps) and her growing friendship with Zerrin. With dating, Savaş gets right the “dreaded prospect of meeting strangers” and, particularly for women who date men, the worry of safety. The narrator’s dates consist mostly of men talking about themselves, eventually resulting in the narrator creating a little game with herself to see “how long [she] could keep [a date] talking, at what point the indulgence might seem strange to even him.” Of interest, too, is that many of these men seem to have the same moves—picking a stray hair off her shoulders, giving her an unexpected twirl. These dates are contrasted with Zerrin’s keen interest in the narrator’s life, her work, her weekends and acquaintances. Zerrin’s close attention even tempts the narrator to “think of [her] youth as a virtue,” especially when in contrast with Zerrin’s life as a single mother, separated from her husband, who gets by on translation work. The closeness of the two women seemingly one-sided: Zerrin appreciates and the narrator accepts such appreciation. And so grows the feeling of social inequity between them.
The narrator begins to see a man from the apps—Kafka—more seriously. He, too, is a twirler. She lies to Zerrin, telling her that they met through mutual friends. Always charmed, Zerrin responds with joy for the narrator, contrasting the narrator’s burgeoning relationship with her own dwindling marriage that ended when she realized “they were only performing a series of gestures they’d committed to memory.” Her husband lives in another town but spends weekends at her house, which is good for their young daughter. The narrator finds Zerrin “a little pathetic,” though repeats that she is a “hero” for being such a caring mother. Through the narrator’s perception of Zerrin, Savaş explores the vast and varied spaces between and around womanhood and motherhood.
That same weekend, the narrator sees Kafka at a bar, with another woman, twirling her about. Upon a quick internet search, our narrator finds a list of dating tips for men which, of course, includes picking a piece of hair or lint off of a date’s shoulder to “create a sense of organic intimacy” and “twirling one’s date out of the blue” to “signal spontaneity and fun, and make a woman feel like a heroine, playing the lead role.” Again at play are questions of social equity and of genuineness: where might we draw the line between sincere intimacy and that fabricated through plan or insincere gesture? These questions come to climax when, just after lying to Zerrin about her dissolution with Kafa, the narrator visits Zerrin’s house, “a two-story villa with vast windows” that the narrator “often admired.” There, the narrator meets Zerrin’s husband in their “lavishly spacious” home, where he kisses Zerrin on the cheek, seemingly oblivious to the separation that Zerrin described to the narrator. In fact, the actuality of Zerrin’s life is much different than the narrator assumed and, after she leaves, she wonders about the sincerity of Zerrin’s previous “admiration” of her life. Had Zerrin only been “humoring” her? It’s this question about intent and outcome that ultimately drives the story—were Zerrin and the narrator also simply twirling one another about in an effort to create something deeper? Does it even really matter between them?
Long Distance is ambitious yet subtle, detailed yet vast. Each of the thirteen stories adds something new to Savaş’s growing body of work focused on distance and closeness and familiarity and alienation. “Future Selves” and “Twirl,” in particular, are exemplary of Long Distance as a whole, of the collection’s deft drafting and lingering questions of fulfillment and isolation. What I always appreciate most about a short story collection is the future-promise of revisiting a single story to, for a brief time, find myself absorbed and understood anew. The stories in Long Distance are capable of just that and, I think, should be revisited again and again.
Danielle Bradley received her MFA from the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work has been supported with scholarships and residencies by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Smith College. The winner of the 2025 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award and a 2025 – 2026 Tin House Reading Fellow, her work appears or is forthcoming in the Colorado Review, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and The Penn Review, among others.
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