Sweet Tooth and Other Stories by Serkan Görkemli

A cinematic collection exploring queerness, identity, and the weight of familial expectations in contemporary Turkey

Sweet Tooth and Other Stories begins and ends with Hasan’s webbed fingers: a congenital condition corrected in childhood so that his future, marked by the wearing of a wedding ring, one of adulthood’s most visible milestones, might proceed without inviting scrutiny. This surgery is ultimately less about function than about perception. Being married, legally and spiritually, is not enough; the thin metal band must act as a kind of beacon, signaling the successful fulfillment of cultural expectations. From the outset, Görkemli asks readers to consider the consequences of altering or otherwise aligning one’s appearance with norms that privilege outward legibility above all else.

Across this tender collection, Görkemli traces how parent, child relationships in modern Turkey are shaped by gendered surveillance and gossip, particularly in contexts where conformity to Muslim values operates as forms of both protection and restraint. As Hasan and his high-school friend Gökhan move away from their small manufacturing hometown of Çorlu, they separately encounter a series of environments in which optics assume increasingly consequential stakes, from classrooms to clubs and activist spaces where mutual political commitments do not necessarily translate to shared levels of optimism or cynicism.

Moving from adolescence to adulthood, this deeply affecting collection charts how evolving perceptions of queerness, illness, and belonging determine the recurring characters’ lived experiences.

What distinguishes Sweet Tooth and Other Stories most powerfully, however, is the richness of its setting. The collection functions, in part, as a primer on Turkish life from the 1980s through the 2010s, where questions of virginity and propriety shape both private relationships and public interactions.

Yet this social scrutiny is matched by an equally powerful sense of historical setting. Nowhere is this clearer than in a scene set in Istanbul, where Görkemli’s striking prose in the story “Vulcan” captures the density of history compressed into the present landscape. As Gökhan moves through Sultan Ahmet Square with his partner Ateş, the ghosts of former empires, from the Egyptian Obelisk of Theodosius to the Ottoman Blue Mosque, coexist, prompting reflection on the “everyday human drama” that unfolds perpetually in their shadows. In these moments, the past does not recede but jumps up to meet the present, so that wandering the city becomes an act of contemplating layered histories alongside the performance and reception of one’s own life. The result is a portrait of Turkey that feels at once palimpsestic yet intensely intimate.

It is not uncommon for a short story collection to have moments that feel uneven or that fall flat under the weight of its more thematically or stylistically ambitious installments. But Sweet Tooth and Other Stories resists this familiar pattern: each story feels integral, sustaining a cinematic quality while consistently inviting empathy for its characters. Even in its most painful moments, Görkemli’s collection leaves readers wanting to linger just a little while longer with the lives he so vividly constructs.

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