MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Immanent readers!  I address you now, free of worldly belongings, untethered to worldly concerns, divested of my bed and other housewares, separated indefinitely from my loyal intern…

I was really happy to spend part of these disembodied days making a tour of some of the East Coast’s most venerable educational institutions.  A huge thanks to Carlo Rotella at Boston College, Natalie Rouland and Tom Hodge at Wellesley, and Cris Martin and Svetlana Boym at Harvard, among the many others who made this possible.

Special thanks are also due to undergraduates Madeleine Schwartz, who invited me to the Harvard Advocate, and Alexandra Dennett, who brought me to Yale’s Saint Anthony Hall. Ms. Dennett and a classmate can be seen below reading The Possessed on the shores of Lake Lagoda Ladoga:

The two friends were on a Russian summer study program together and didn’t realize they were both reading my book until they happened to sit down at the beach that afternoon!

Because I love pictures of girls gone wild for Russian literature, I was also very happy to receive the following from Amy Knowles (a calculus teacher in North Carolina), who appears below with her friend Shannon at the time of their college graduation. Amy had just written a thesis on Andrei Bolkonsky; Shannon had written about The Brothers Karamazov.

Ladies, I salute you!

Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

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

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I was so happy, entertained, and confused to receive a response from pro-Kindle Amazon reviewer T. Mercer regarding my last post (Kindle Schmindle), that I decided to answer as a new post.

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

If there’s one thing about the writing life that recommends itself to young people, it’s the limited capital outlay.  You don’t need to pay salaries, rent a recording studio, or make weekly trips to Denver… but does that mean it’s all about sitting back and watching the money roll in?   Alas.  Today I bring you a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wind up with between $817–$1,067 work-related expenses.

It started one day in August, when I received a notice for a missed UPS delivery.  The only package I was expecting at that time was the first uncensored translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, which the publishers had been trying to mail me for some weeks, as part of a campaign to get people to write Solzhenitsyn profiles:

Although Solzhenitsyn died last August, the following individuals are available for interviews: Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia (who made headlines last month when she rebuked Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him); the author’s son, pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is musical director for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the noted Solzhenitsyn scholar. They can discuss:

· Where Solzhenitsyn fits in to the great Russian literary realist tradition bequeathed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky;

· The two decades he spent as an exile in Vermont, stripped of his Russian citizenship.  How he lived in such fear of the KGB that he built a barb wire fence around his home;

· The differences between Stalin’s regime and the Russian leadership of today—and what might happen if Solzhenitsyn were writing today;

· How he damaged his reputation in the West by championing Christianity and railing against American pop culture in a rambling commencement speech at Harvard;

· The “censored” portions of IN THE FIRST CIRCLE, which included suggestions that Stalin had been a double agent, and that the Soviet Union should not possess the atomic bomb;

· And much more.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Being overdue on three deadlines, I am obliged to leave the Solzhenitsyn-profiling to other and better C-list writers, whom I certainly wish a pleasant phone chat with the musical director of the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra on the subject of AS’s famous “rambling speech” of 1978.

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Caroline Kennedy tried her hardest, but she was not able to suppress the story of the Russian bells, which appears in the April 27 issue of the New Yorker, on newsstands today.   There is also a podcast on the New Yorker website where you can listen not only to the bells themselves, but also to me trying to remember some facts about bells, which you could probably find faster using Google.  Actually the nice thing about a phone interview, I learned, is that you can pause mid-answer to look things up on Wikipedia, and later the pause/ typing sounds will be edited out.

For some reason, they didn’t link to any images of the destruction of bells in Soviet times, so I will do it here instead.  There are some great images here, and especially here. 

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