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."

Confessions of a Nowaday Child

Literature & Fiction

Ayden, Erje

Literary

Tough Poets Press

The Crazy Green of Second Avenue

Citadel Pr

Seven years of winter: An autobiography

London Magazine Editions

Pulp fiction writer Erje Ayden's coy novel is his most autobiographical work—if one accepts his claim that he worked as a spy for the Turkish government in the 1960s and 70s.
I wonder if it is lustful A tank in its dreams What do airplanes think When left alone? We did not seek happiness We invented sadness Were we not of this world? -- Orhan Veli, epigram to Sadness at Leaving
During the 1960s and 70s, Turkish-born Erje Ayden served as house pulp fiction writer to the New York School of painters and poets. Friend and sometime bodyguard to the artist Willem De Kooning, Ayden self-published 7 pop novels, written in rapid amphetamine bursts in borrowed apartments and rooming houses. Sadness at Leaving, re-published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, is Ayden's most autobiographical work -- if one accepts, as he claims, that he worked as a spy for the Turkish government throughout those years. East Berlin, 1959: Following the erection of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned by East German intelligence to move to New York where he'll "sleep" as a writer until he is called. Using the code-name "April 23," Carl successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks, and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden's hilarious Norman Mailer pastiche. Through Carl's eyes, we see New York City change from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic, post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects it, he's called.

Sadness at Leaving: An Espionage Romance

Erotica

Semiotext

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Books by Ayden, Erje