Erje Ayden (1936–2013) was born in Istanbul to a Turco-Russian family. In the 1950s he worked as spy in Paris. He moved to New York in 1957 where he started writing performance and prose pieces and befriended, among others, Willem de Kooning and Frank O’Hara. In the 1960s and 70s his novels The Crazy Green of Second Avenue, Sadness at Leaving (Semiotext(e), 1987), and From Hauptbahnhof I Took a Train became cult bestsellers. He published over two dozen books, including Lost Cloud, a collection of short stories spanning fifty years.