"The first thing you see are the cigarette butts. There are thousands of them — 4,213 to be exact — mounted behind plexiglass on the ground floor of the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s new museum, named for and based on his 2008 novel, 'The Museum of Innocence.'"

In this New York Times article on the actualization of  Orhan Pamuk's “The Museum of Innocence,” readers are toured through the collection's 19th-century house that holds relics from intricate parts of the novel's story line: an earring lost in the first scene, old clocks, film clips, soda bottles and the bed in which where the main character, Kemal, sleeps the last years of his life.

The museum, in the Cukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul, is a replica of the fictional exhibit that Kemal builds in the novel. Its corporeal presence creates a complex crossover between fiction and reality, presenting visitors with a new context in which to consider the story.

Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature. He took part in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP) in the fall of 1985.