The wonderful San Francisco independent The Booksmith recommends No One You Know today in the Top Shelf column of the San Francisco Chronicle. If you’re out of the area and can’t make it to readings, you can purchase signed (and even personalized!) copies of No One You Know by emailing orders@booksmith.com. The other fiction titles recommended by the Booksmith in today’s column are: Love and Obstacles, by Aleksandar Hemon A Fortunate Age, by Joanna Smith Rakoff Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, Reif Larsen
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Burning the Keyboard
Okay, my computer keyboard can burn up today, I can succumb to a suffocating writer’s block, and I will still have this: One of my absolute favorite musicians, Lloyd Cole, linked to my No One You Know playlist, on which his great song, “Rattlesnakes,” appears. In addition to the playlist, which is included in the just-released paperback edition of the book, there’s another reference to Lloyd early in the novel, while Ellie is wandering around a Paris graveyard with her sister: Lila placed a piece of paper on Poincare’s gravestone and rubbed over it with a pencil. Then she...
Songs to Write By
When I’m first piecing together the bones of a book, one of the most important things for me is to find the right rhythm. In the early stages of No One You Know I had a CD in the car, which contained a mix of a number of my favorite instrumental pieces: the soundtrack to The Endless Summer, Lesley Spencer’s Russian Waltz, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Railroad Man–quiet, contemplative pieces, some piano, some guitar. Then, as I began to get more deeply into the story, more songs drifted into my head. Some on this list are mentioned in the novel, others...
Musings of a Bookish Kitty
There’s an in-depth review of No One You Know over at Musings of a Bookish Kitty. Here’s an excerpt: “One of my favorite aspects of the novel was the balance between mathematics and the elements that make a good story. Two aspects that might seem so very different on the surface, and yet share a lot in common. On one hand the author would offer a mathematical conjecture and how it may come to be proven, while on the other, she would describe how a story is shaped and formed. It is an overreaching theme that fit well with...
Book Giveaway: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
I first heard about Joshilyn Jackson while doing a book tour down South several years ago. I kept seeing her books and hearing her name everywhere, so before getting on a plane back to San Francisco, I bought a copy of gods in Alabama. It takes a very long time to get from Alabama to San Francisco. By the time my plane landed at SFO, Joshilyn Jackson had a new fan. Then I started reading her blog, which is as warm and darkly funny as her books. Jackson’s latest novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, is a contemporary ghost...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
