About this item
Highlights
- Erje Ayden's long out-of-print Confessions of a Nowaday Child is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Turkish-born writer living in New York City's Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with occasional flashbacks to his childhood in Istanbul, who makes a promise to himself "to become the greatest writer of the new American generation," despite the fact that he can barely speak or write in English.
- Author(s): Erje Ayden
- 118 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
A semi-autobiographical novel about a Turkish-born writer living in New York City's Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with flashbacks to his childhood in Istanbul, who makes a promise to himself "to become the greatest writer of the new American generation," despite the fact that he can barely speak or write in English.Book Synopsis
Erje Ayden's long out-of-print Confessions of a Nowaday Child is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Turkish-born writer living in New York City's Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with occasional flashbacks to his childhood in Istanbul, who makes a promise to himself "to become the greatest writer of the new American generation," despite the fact that he can barely speak or write in English.
As the original 1966 edition's jacket blurb states, "It's all here -- how and why he did it -- the incredible sexual adventures, the violence and the poetry of a tormented mind that has moments of great beauty, simplicity, joy. It's breathtaking in its arrogance, but strangely an affirmation of life, modern life, and the process of making it. The straight, cruddy reality and its rewards spelled out."
Review Quotes
"The artlessness of the writing makes the experience of reading Ayden as refreshing and startling as drinking from a natural brook in the center of Manhattan." -- Seymour Krim
"Ayden is one of the sexiest writers we have; because of his struggles with acquired language he has a vigor uncommon among our novelists; without the mannerist inclinations of Salinger, Pynchon, Barth, or Updike, he is able to convey the real trouble underneath the bizarre and the banal." -- Frank O'Hara
"Erje Ayden's novels provide a little-known but fascinating view of American bohemian and bourgeois society from the point of view of a sympathetically bemused Turkish observer. The wonder is that Ayden's not more famous, as he can be as addictive as Simenon or Proust." -- John Ashbery