Boundaries are tricky. The line between a customer service interaction and a little flirting can be hard to find. What about if you’re being paid to be the face of a famous novelist – one whose own face you’ve never seen? Who are you if the line between you and her grows foggy?
Hilal Isler’s debut collection of short stories, Har Mar, pokes at such murky intimacies with a forgiving scalpel. Nannies and servers, caretakers and mothers, writers and models all strive for something more in these stories, and the central question seems to be whether crossing some perimeter will bring their dream world into reality – or send the protagonist crashing into a nightmare. Isler, a UT professor of instruction, received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and taught social justice at the University of Minnesota before making her way to Austin. These places, and many others, factor into her stories spread across the Turkish diaspora. Her characters travel back and forth between geographical boundaries, each making sense of a multicultural identity as they endeavor to answer questions about where they belong and how their life decisions are influenced by traditions and prejudices.
In “Honey,” a teenage writer’s grandfather instructs her to give up telling stories about climate change and instead focus on tales “Western people have come to expect from Turkish writers. ‘Honor killings,’ he advises. ‘The veil. Talk about Ramadan.’”
Though none of the stories in this collection concede to such exoticised desires, readers meet other writers in Har Mar who find success in this model, trading on stereotypes and, sometimes, puzzling over the implications of representation.
If receiving creative recognition can involve a sort of personal compromise, work and love do too for the young women in these pages. In “Nothing for Something,” a wannabe model glimpses the seemingly glamorous lifestyle of a pharmaceutical representative and buys the costume before coming face-to-face with the facts of the role. In the titular short story, a bookshop barista is willing to look past her boyfriend’s cliched songwriting and confused past until a reconnection tests the limits of her acceptance. “The Keys” rewards another woman’s ability to look the other way in a relationship with a delightfully speculative solution – the only such story to dabble in intergalactic magical realism in this work.
Isler’s prose is sharply observational – relishing in the judgmental sides of her characters, expressed in shorthand anecdotes that paint big pictures: a boyfriend who’s destined to send Bible verse-embossed Christmas cards, for example, and white cousins who, fingers in her hair, tell their Turkish relation she looks like Beyoncé. “I look nothing at all like Beyoncé,” the protagonist affirms internally.
Though Isler finds humor in these assessments and intercultural tensions, she is merciful toward her at-times bumbling and wayward protagonists and the people they love. Patiently, she profiles their insecurities and complimentary affirmations – “She still had her right mind and a fully intact, functional colon. It was not too late for her,” Safiye reminds herself in “Mister Morning Barista.” The tumble through longing and into delusion can be sudden – as several characters come to understand. An unrequited love becomes a fictional fiancé, a street vendor, a stalker, and – in a simpler sense – an imagined life, a stifling one. When her characters butt up against the bounds of their fantasies, the author extends grace, finding understandable warmth in even troubled romantic relationships and complicated bonds with family, friends, co-workers, and employers. Class, age, and cultural differences further tangle these connections, which Isler expounds upon in a matter-of-fact, never-essentialising fashion.
Her stories live largely in the heads of her protagonists as they make imperfect sense of the world around them – their unreliable perspectives are punctured by dialogue with friends and lovers. After many a big fall, Isler lets her characters flounder with gasping breaths as they search for their resolve, sometimes even granting them a fresh start in the form of a haircut, a bus ride, or a bender. More often than not, however, the author leaves them in twitching, mid-decision discomfort. Through her empathetic lens, readers are made to squirm with secondhand embarrassment and wince with recognition, even in situations that are foreign to their own experience, ultimately rooting for her flawed characters and their familiar fallacies.
Har Mar
By Hilal Isler
Curbstone Books
This article appears in August 21 • 2026.
