Confessions of a Nowaday Child

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."