My Life and Thoughts

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.

Caroline Kennedy vs. Giant Russian Bell: similar, but not quite the same.

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Dear readers!  I am happy to relate that my piece called "The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation" is in the February issue of Harper’s magazine, which subscribers can already read online—it has a really amazing piece of original artwork by Steven Dana which I will post here, if it turns out not to violate any copyright.  In the meantime, tiny, law-abiding people, like the ones who live in Lech Walesa’s mustache, might enjoy looking at a tiny, legal reproduction.  And also at a picture of home and its environs, back in the day.

"The Murder of Leo Tolstoy" is about how I went to an International Tolstoy Conference at Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana, and tried to determine whether Tolstoy died of natural causes or was… MURDERED.  It has some interesting generic features, e.g. I originally wrote it in the form of a short story.  Then my editor was like, "But it all really happened, right?", and I was like, “Well, pretty much,” and, to make a long story short, it was put in the Miscellany section, as a literary memoir, and was even assigned a fact-checker—you know, to fact-check my memoir.

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