The beautiful future
Dear readers, thanks for all the kind comments on “Safe Laughs,” as well as for notifying me that I-14, a bit like the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy, is at this point only a beautiful dream of the future, and the road one was actually driving down in 2007 was California State Route 14. I have just posted those outtakes here—they include Dostoevsky’s prophetic analysis of the psychology of road rage.
In other beautiful fictions, the FSG winter 2010 catalog is now available online, and if waiting for enormous pdf files to load is one of your special hobbies, I warmly encourage you to check it out. All others will have to content themselves with this excerpt:
In The Possessed we watch [Batuman] investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
Although “Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg” certainly has a nice ring, there is this interesting circumstance that I have never, to the best of my knowledge, actually been to Switzerland. Yet. I figure the Macmillan group can see into the future, and that must be the subject of my next book. Avanti!
This clock tells the time of the future.
Tags: fact-checking, hope, publications, Pushkin, Russian literature, THE POSSESSED, Tolstoy, Uzbekistan
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:56 am
Hi Elif, ‘Stanford, Switzerland’ sounded to me like ‘Cambridge, England’, or ‘Paris, France’. Perhaps somebody at Palgrave simply got the wrong Stanford. But there’s no indication of which St. Petersburg we are to accompany you to. Any clues?
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:37 am
as did so many others i used to reside in an oxford that’s in cambridge that’s in boston. the novelty never wore off.
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:42 am
I liked this part from the catelogue: “a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.” Yeah, copywriter!!
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:52 am
It has to be St. Petersburg, Missouri, up there on the far end of Interstate 14 where errant New Yorker fact checkers are sent for reeducation at the Accordion Academy
.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:42 am
No, it’s St. Petersbourg in sunny South dakota.