I just received the following response:

Elif, thanks!! And today is world kidney day, really.

dad

Yes, dear readers, March 11 is really World Kidney Day and has been officially recognized by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, American rock icon Meat Loaf, world superpower China, and now C-list writer Elif Batuman.

This World Kidney Day, I find myself recalling fond nephrology-related memories from my childhood, like the time we went on a nephrologists’ outing to Bear Island with a totally sodium-free picnic, so it was a holiday for our kidneys, too!  (This was the first and last time I ever ate unsalted potato chips, which were very peculiar.)  Another time, my father gave me a beautiful kidney-shaped bumper sticker, red with white lettering, that said: “I Love You from the Bottom of My Kidney.”  I put it on my lunchbox.

Tender-hearted readers!  I trust that you are moved by these touching reminiscences to the extent that now, like Sarkozy and Meat Loaf, you too would like to do something special to commemorate World Kidney Day.  Here are some thoughtful suggestions:

• You could send a free World Kidney Day e-card.  But people might think you’re being cheap.
• You know what makes a classy yet affordable World Kidney Day gift, is a book by a nephrologist’s daughter, with cover art by Roz Chast, the super-cartoonist known for her vivid representation of the dangers of an unhappy kidney!
• Looking for a romantic date idea for someone you love from the bottom of your kidney?  How about a literary reading by a nephrologist’s daughter at Kepler’s books tonight at 7:30pm?

Your kidneys will thank you (if I may be so bold as to speak for your kidneys), and so will I!

Here at My Life and Thoughts, we are all about occasionally letting the staff see the light of day—but only when they feel like it.  Join us on our three-part epic journey:

In other news from how I’m super-tapped in to the heartbeat of today’s minimum-wage workers, I hear the cleaning staff at a certain important New York city publication has been leaving coded messages regarding the true place of The Possessed in the ranks of world literature:

“Look at this! Elif’s book and War and Peace mysteriously found each other on my bookshelf! do you think the nighttime cleaning staff did it?”  (from Eben Shapiro, via the charming and versatile Fiona St. Claire)

Thanks, guys!

Prolific readers!  I can’t thank you enough for all the kind and entertaining communications I’ve received since the release of The Possessed.  I fully intend to answer all of them as soon as possible (as long as a return email is given)—but I’m afraid I need to call a hiatus, just for a week or two, while I cope with the rigors of maintaining my foothold on the C-list.  It’s no joke up here, let me tell you.  This week I not only did three interviews with Turkish newspapers who are proud of me for being a Turkish-American writers, and an interview with the Voice of America Central Asia program to share my thoughts about Uzbekistan, and four other interviews, and a trip to L.A., but I also had my first experiences with making up lists of things.  I didn’t realize this before, but making up lists is a huge part of promoting a first book.  Apparently, nothing reassures the book-buying public more than knowing that an unheard-of author is capable of identifying 5–10 related entities and designating them with consecutive numbers.

List aficionados should definitely check out my Dangerous Friends–themed reading list for Bookforum, as well as the Possessed-related playlist for Largehearted Boy. Coming up soon they can also enjoy the alternative Russian canon I made up for the Daily Beast, which took all day because the more I thought about it, the more I realized I actually think the existing Russian canon is OK.  Just wait and see how I ingeniously solved this problem.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg of venues for C-list writers to publish their lists of things. A couple of weeks ago, at my publicist’s suggestion, I also submitted a pitch to the NPR “Three Books” series—it took me a whole day just to wrap my head around the concept.  First I was like, “Wait—why three books?”  Then I read on their website that it’s because “we live in a three-dimensional world, colored with hues that break down into a trio of primary colors.”  Then I was like, “Huh.”  Then I ate a sandwich.  Then I decided, “You know what, never mind why three books, let’s just look at some examples.”  So I looked at the Three Books list from the week in question:

This year, Valentine’s Day shares the 14th with Chinese New Year. Cupid had better flap his wings because it’s the Year of the Tiger, and tigers don’t eat chocolate. To commemorate this rare alignment, here are three books about love in Chinese families.

I spent another hour trying, unsuccessfully, to think of a list of three books that exploited the cosmic convergence of Ash Wednesday with the US-Germany Women’s Curling match, but then my publicist said that actually what I should be compiling were some idiosyncratic lists containing Russian books, to remind people that I have an idiosyncratic view of Russian literature.  I eventually thought up no fewer than five such lists—that’s fifteen books!  and fifteen is the atomic number of phosphorus!—so you can just imagine how proud I was.  Puzzlingly, it seems that NPR was less pleased with me than I was with myself, because I never heard anything back from them.  Well, you know what, NPR?  You can have your three books, because lists and I are through.

Coveted readers!  I have to leave you now to go watch some visionary masterpieces of Armenian film, so I can write a review of them, thus simultaneously promoting my book among the readers of obscure movie reviews, while taking bread from the mouths of writers who actually know something about Armenian film.  Talk about two birds with one stone—because you know all those other C-listers aren’t going to elbow themselves in the ribs!!  Hopefully next time I can tell you about the wonderful 36 hours I spent last week in Los Angeles.  In the meantime, many many thanks to Louise Steinman, David Ulin, and everyone who made it to the LAPL on Wednesday!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

A special premium shout-out is due to all the hedge fund managers who shelled out the extra $$ to shop locally: as a result, The Possessed came in at #14 onthe NPR independent best sellers  list, trailing just two titles after Chelsea Handler’s Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.

And, speaking of independent bookstores and vodka, many thanks to City Lights, for hosting the wonderful vodka martini book launch last Wednesday. Attendees included super-philanthropost Adam Tolnay, enabler of the great scene of cross-cultural exchange narrated in the introductory essay of The Possessed, wherein I am called upon, in my capacity as an English teacher at a Hungarian children’s camp, to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. What an amazing stroke of luck that Adam, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly 15 years, happened to be in town for a conference on Papua New Guinea, the beautiful island nation that he is currently supplying with American students for the purpose of Education, Empowerment, and Exchange, which I imagine as one long series of judging leg contests!

Also in noteworthy attendance was the C-list writer and B+-list translator Damion Searls, who gallantly recited a Daniil Kharms story on demand during the Q/A, and whose recent story collection, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, not only disproves all the horrible things I have said over the years about the contemporary short story, but also features a cameo appearance by a two-foot-tall wooden Pushkin who advises the narrator on important life issues.  In this way What We Were Doing is similar to The Possessed, the narrator of which also makes some life decisions based on ideas ascribed to Pushkin.  Searls’s version of this age-old story may not actually contain an adolescent boys’ leg contest, but it is still warmly recommended to all my dear readers, especially to everyone who wrote to me that they have The Possessed in their Amazon shopping cart but can’t check out until they spend another $14.80 and qualify for free Super-Saver Shipping.

I know what you are saying to yourselves.  “You rat!  That book you recommended only costs $10.36, meaning I still have to spend $4.44 to get my free shipping!”  So OK, you got me. But fortunately, I have some more recommendations.  Discriminating readers!  If you liked “Babel in California,” you definitely need to own both the Norton Critical Edition of Babel’s Selected Writings, edited by Gregory Freidin, and The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context (not to be confused with Enigma, the novel by Robert Harris).

The Norton Critical Babel unites for the first time, in one lightweight and affordable English-language paperback volume, all of Babel’s essential writings, plus selected letters, plus contemporary reminisces (many appearing in English for the first time), plus fabulous critical essays by the likes of Viktor Shklovsky and Gregory Freidin.  Still more fabulous critical essays can be found in Enigma, which contains all the excellent papers given at the 2004 Stanford Babel conference, including Freidin’s magisterial “The Other Babel”—plus, as a wonderful bonus, my own one and only academic publication (”Pan Pisar’: Clerkship in Babel’s First-Person Narration”).  Read it and mourn the loss to the academy!

That’s all for now, because I have to go find a Ziplock bag to put my toothpaste in so I can go to Los Angeles.  I hope to see some of you at the LAPL Central Library on Wednesday at 7!

Dear T. Mercer,

Thank you for your kind message, and for your interest in The Possessed.  I was deeply gratified to learn of your willingness to pay $15 to read it electronically.  As it happens, I don’t have an electronic version to send you.  The last few rounds of editing are done on paper proofs that are literally sent back and forth via UPS.  In the end, the marked-up proofs are shipped to Ghana to be retyped by orphans.  So if you really want to “cut through all this middle-man bullshit,” you’d probably better get in touch with those orphans.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about whether I would send Kindle fans an electronic copy if I had one… and I’m really not sure!  I don’t know who is right and who is wrong in the standoff between Amazon and Macmillan (which owns FSG)—from what I see, it’s two huge corporations pursuing their huge corporate interests, far from the realm of ordinary human existences like yours and mine.

So let’s leave that out.

In general, of course, I’m in favor of books being made available electronically and at a low price, and it seems that in the future this will happen according to the model you suggest, with authors releasing material directly to the public.  But, the state of the world today being what it is, I’m actually really grateful that FSG published my book—and I’m super-grateful to my super-editor Lorin and his super-assistant Georgia and the super-publicist Brian, and the numerous super copy-editors, who are all such great people and worked so hard to make The Possessed as good as it could be, and to get it out there.  And if you and I cut out the middleman, what do they get? I mean, guess I could give them their cut myself, but I’m a writer, not an HR manager—I don’t have the time, training, or temperament to go around dividing up checks.

Furthermore, I’m also grateful to Amazon for selling my book under the list price.  (I am disappointed that they’ve now hiked it up to $10.20, which can still get you a single Brita replacement filter with $.04 left over—and needless to say I would love The Possessed to be on Kindle—but still, a $10 paperback is not bad at all.)  But, at the same time, I’m also definitely in favor of independent bookstores, and I know they can’t afford to give $5 discounts whenever they feel like it.  So maybe I’m wrong to send people to buy a cheap copy on Amazon (which giant sinister corporation now gives me 6.5% of the price of every book sold through the URL on this website, so I’m extra-compromised!).

In the end I decided it’s OK to leave the question of Amazon vs. independent up to individual readers to work out between their ideals and their pocketbooks. But of course if I go around selling the book myself, that’s bad for independent booksellers and Amazon!

In short, T. Mercer, the more I think about it, the more I realize the only thing I’m really sure of in this mess is that you should definitely read Oblomov. I notice it’s available in multiple Kindle editions.

Всего лучшего!
Elif