Aan Zee, the Novel
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Aan Zee is a novel I started writing at the beginning of the 1980s. Actually I wrote a short story, and brought it in to be critiqued by William Kennedy when I took his fiction writing class in 1983. Kennedy encouraged me to expand the story into a novel. So it grew over time, but then got stuck since the prospects of bringing it to a publisher dwindled over the years, to nil. As a scientist I didn’t have a lot of time to push it either. One agent looked at it and declared it “esthetically flat.” Well, thanks a lot! I recovered from the verdict and went through the text many times to unflatten it. But it still had no prospect of a market.
Well, then I got my Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017, and suddenly my literary activities were front-line. It all began with a journalist of the Wall Street Journal who interviewed me about my fiction, and this resulted in a one-page article in a weekend edition of the WSJ talking about William Kennedy and my literary ambitions as a speaker of English as a second language. This was followed by a flattering invitation by Paul Grondahl, the new director of the Albany Writers Institute, to talk about my fiction and spend time with students. This was an unforgettable event in spring of 2018. William Kennedy and others joined me at dinner that night — an event unimaginable in my former life.
Then, in May of this year, while I was in Valencia, in Spain, being part of the jury of a prestigious Prize honoring Spanish scientists, I was interviewed by a journalist of El Pais. He professed no interest in my scientific achievements (he is right — too much has already been written about that!) but instead focused on my fiction writing, known from my franxfiction website. A few days later, his article appeared, with the headline in Spanish that went something like “Nobel Laureate has written 3 unpublished novels but has not found a publisher.” Within a few days, three publishers contacted me, and I signed a contract with one: University Press of the South, which has titles in English, Spanish, and French.
The book is already coming out — look on Amazon, or even better: go directly to the website of University Press of the South.
UPDATE February 9, 2020: The book was published on October 25, 2019. Unfortunately, since the press is located in Mexico (as I found out too late), the distribution turned out to be difficult. The book is still listed on Amazon as “currently unavailable.”
I was recently able to set up one path for ordering the book: through the Book Loft in Great Barrington. You can order the book by going to their website: https://www.thebookloft.com/buy-books.
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