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If a hardback copy just wasn’t a flexible enough format for your reading pleasure, I’m pleased to announce that the paperback, Kindle and eBook editions of Larry’s Kidney are now available for order. A large print edition is also available, and be on the lookout for more options in the very near future (non-readers, check back soon!)
UPDATE! “LARRY’S KIDNEY” has been listed as one of the TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR by Publishers Weekly, and has been optioned to be a major motion picture. Since the summer, Daniel has appeared on NPR, CNN, The New York Times Op Ed Page, and over 35 radio programs. In addition, he has read from the book in Albuquerque, Boston, New York, Detroit, Denver, San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Portland (Oregon), Saint Louis, and Providence. Thanks to all my readers for your invaluable support …
The media blitz continues!
Check out my recent interview on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show (You can stream the hour-long show from this page.) Some discussion of the adventures surrounding Larry’s Kidney, and about organ transplants in the US with Dr. Robert Montgomery.
In case you missed it in the July 10th New York Times, here’s a link to my Op Ed piece about the organ transplant system in the United States. And it’s here on the site as well, for your browsing convenience. And of course, this seems like a good a time as ever to mention, yet again, the importance of donating your organs. Hopefully this message is starting to stick…
The Larry’s Kidney book tour continues at Half King (505 W. 23rd St New York, NY 10012), on Monday, July 13, 2009. Give them a call at 212-462-4300 for more info!
It’s the final day of this week-long blog, and we (my self-interviewer and me) thought it might be nice to reward everyone with a behind-the-scenes glimpse at some of the characters and scenes in Larry’s Kidney. We realize that, as readers, nothing’s more fun than imagining everything in our minds (that’s why we predominantly identify ourselves as readers, after all, rather than TV-watchers), but still it’s fun to jump-start our imagination with some of the particulars. So with a great deal of circumspection, so as not to identify any of the people or places that could get themselves in trouble for abetting our illegal kidney hunt, here’s a little show-and-tell for your delectation. (more…)
So to resume, we were talking about the tone of Larry’s Kidney, which you characterized as one of “pizzazz, for better or worse.”
I don’t mean to claim that all my writing has pizzazz, but this one certainly did. I locked myself in my attic for six months and just let it tell itself, with all the color and crazy dust of China still on it.
Six months!? Yet the book previous to this one, Hiding Places, took you almost ten years.
Well, that one WAS about the Holocaust, after all. Pretty daunting. Medical tourism is a snap after the Holocaust. (I can’t believe I just said that.) But six months does help bring down my average considerably.
Time out to talk about a larger issue here. An issue that’s way bigger than Larry, way bigger than Larry’s Kidney, but that lies at the heart of this discussion:
The need for people to donate organs.
Wait!- Don’t go away. This is urgent. Do you realize that FEWER people are donating organs this year than in previous years? Apparently this is the first time this has happened since they started tracking donor statistics two decades ago.
At the same time, MORE people are in dire need of organs. The number of people languishing on the waiting list is growing by leaps and bounds – some 50,000 more people will join the list in 2009.
Let’s talk about the use of dialect in the book. May I quote from the Author’s Note?
Be my guest. You’re me, after all.
Here goes:
Although it has traditionally been considered condescending to write in dialect, the climate seems to be changing and for good reason. In his recent book about India, The Elephanta Suite, Paul Theroux uses such locutions as “wicious” for vicious, “moddom” for madam, and “wee-icle” for vehicle in an effort to transmit more shades of emotional truth than a sanitized transcript can. Nor is the practice limited to native English writers. By writing, “My bawss was sacked, so we got laid all together” in his recent novel, A Free Life, the Chinese-American author Ha Jin suggests how cross-cultural communication is a creative process for both native and visitor, with results that are sometimes as revealing as Freudian slips. Tracking both how foreigners use the English language, and how an American visitor scrambles to make sense of foreign sounds, is here meant to transmit the spirit of modern travel equal parts charming and alarming.
I stand by those words.