My Life and Thoughts

My first two guest posts, CSI Pushkin’s House and Pushkin Reloaded, are currently up at the New Yorker Book Bench.  Many many thanks to super book-blogger Macy Halford for her kind endorsement of my hardest-working intern!  Thanks also to Gideon Lewis-Kraus and the unstoppable Dave Lull for alerting me to the unfolding story of Pushkin’s sofa.

Coming up very soon: a stirring defense of weekends by my own guest-blogger, Peli Grietzer.  A nous deux, Slate—history will decide which of us made the right call on this one.

Pushkin’s sofa	Pushkin sofa

Auspicious news for my interns just in from Amazon, via an honored reader.   Thank you for your support!

Dear readers!  It took some time, but I finally outsmarted those turkeys and am back at my desk, just in time for the impending release of The Possessed, which you can preorder right now from Amazon for the low, low price of $10.12.  Those with concerns about my interns’ nutritional intake are particularly encouraged you to order from one of the links on this page: that way, thanks to the Amazon Associates program, we get 4% extra per copy.

That means for every copy you buy, we get $0.40: the cost of approximately 1.78 fl. oz. Ensure High Protein Complete Balanced Nutrition Drink!

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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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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.