Gre­go­ry Lev­ey​‘s newest book, How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment, is now avail­able. He will be blog­ging all week for the JBC/MJL Author Blog.

It was just after four in the morn­ing, and I was on the phone dis­cussing the Mid­dle East con­flict with a man I assumed was a truck dri­ver. I was more than a lit­tle grog­gy, and so I wasn’t total­ly fol­low­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, even when I was the one talking.

Oh, and one more detail. There were thou­sands of peo­ple lis­ten­ing to us, because we were on the radio.

This hap­pened just a few days ago, and I’m still not ful­ly sure what I said, because I was half-asleep. I may have men­tioned some­thing about the threat of vio­lence along the Israel-Korea bor­der, or expressed anx­i­ety about not hav­ing stud­ied for the ninth grade math test I imag­ined I was about to take.

This is some­times the real­i­ty of book pro­mo­tion when you’re a no-name author aboard the sink­ing ship of pub­lish­ing. You’ll do any­thing to sell a few more books, even if it means wak­ing up in the mid­dle of the night to talk about the Mid­dle East, field­ing calls from the type of peo­ple who not only lis­ten to the radio at that awful hour, but also feel the need to phone in.

My new book is called How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment, so I guess I sort of brought this on myself. And who knows? Maybe that truck­er who was dri­ving down that lone­some high­way with my inane ban­ter his only com­pa­ny came up with a work­able solu­tion to the Mid­dle East conflict.

I don’t know, because I was bare­ly con­scious. But if you were lis­ten­ing and
we made any progress, please fill me in.

Gre­go­ry Levey’s Face­book group has over 750,000 fans. His sec­ond book, How to Make Peace in the Mid­dle East in Six Months or Less With­out Leav­ing Your Apart­ment, has just been released.