Ayşegül Savaş on Smugness and Creativity
Ayşegül Savaş discusses her story "Many Worlds," which explores the themes of smugness and creativity through the experiences of a Turkish couple, Defne and Mete. The narrative unfolds as they encounter their former American housemate, Aleksi, prompting reflections on their past and present selves. Savaş emphasizes how smugness can hinder artistic exploration and the importance of remaining open to new perspectives.
- ▪The story features a Turkish couple, Defne and Mete, who reconnect with their former housemate Aleksi in Istanbul.
- ▪Savaş highlights the theme of smugness as an obstacle to creativity and personal growth.
- ▪The narrative is primarily told from Defne's perspective, revealing her internal conflicts and certainties.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The New Yorker |
| Canonical URL | https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/aysegul-savas-06-01-26 |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T10:37:32.389Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T10:37:32.389Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | V2xtEMyqpcqG · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This Week in FictionAyşegül Savaş on Smugness and CreativityThe author discusses her story “Many Worlds.”By Cressida LeyshonMay 24, 2026Illustration by The New Yorker; Source photograph by Maks OvsjanikovSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyThis interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.This week’s story, “Many Worlds,” is about a young Turkish couple, Defne and Mete, who met as graduate students in California and are now back in Istanbul. By chance, they run into their former American housemate, Aleksi, who now looks so dishevelled that Defne mistakes him for a homeless man.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The New Yorker.
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