The New Yorker's September 22nd issue featured two Riverhead authors—Aleksandar Hemon and George Saunders. Read Hemon's short story, "The Noble Truths of Suffering," and Saunders piece on Sarah Palin, "My Gal", if you know what's good for you.
Sarah Vowell, author of the forthcoming The Wordy Shipmates, writes about her gratitude for Pell Grants in The New York Times: "Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my elbows in ham instead of 40."
National Public Radio chooses Adam Davies' Mine all Mine as one of the "Books We Love." "Fleet and funny, Mine All Mine resembles Davies' earlier overdue-coming-of-age comedies in its boyish wit and calls to mind many a recent American novel in its comic-book boisterousness." Read more about the novel, including an excerpt, here.
How big of a geek are you? Henry Jenkins of MIT uses Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to help you determine where you land on the geek spectrum.
Riverhead author Steven Johnson inspires a band to name itself after a term he uses in Everything Bad is Good For You. See why "sleepercurve" chose this name.
Listen to Bill Scher from LiberalOasis interview Aleksandar Hemon about The Lazarus Project and how he approaches art and politics.
The Agony Column Book Reviews and Commentary talks to Nathaniel Rich, author of The Mayor's Tongue and "a wonderful fabulist and a careful thinker." Listen to the two part interview here.
Khaled Hosseini is continuing his run as the author of choice for reading groups, with his Afghanistan-set novel The Kite Runner voted book of the year for the third time in a row (in the UK). Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, came in second place in the contest, which saw more than 100 reading groups vote for their favorite books.
Read Riverhead author Geoff Nicholson's essay in The New York Times Book Review, "My Literary Malady," about his run-in with gout: "The received wisdom associates gout with debauchery and decadence. It's supposed to afflict bloated, self-indulgent, post-middle-aged clubmen (never women) who slump in leather armchairs, gorging on grouse, port and Stilton and railing against youth and modernity. Definitely not people like me."
Jennifer Nix, political activist and writer, found that in becoming an activist she was losing sight of art. But, she writes for The Huffington Post, "Rather than reaching for the Xanax, I want to share with you news of a book that has resurrected my love of literature, one I hope can provide sustenance for your progressive soul as well. The book is called The Lazarus Project...This storytelling creates empathy on a level that no polemic or journalism can, and it helped to make me feel whole and inspired again. That's the power of literature. It fills up the well."
In the wake of Radovan Karadzic recent arrest Aleksandar Hemon writes in The New York Times about Karadzic's October 14th, 1991 speech: "It was a spectacular, if blood-curdling, performance. Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 13 years in hiding, was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which already controlled the parts of Bosnia that had a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the Parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. His very presence rendered the Parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the Parliament represented." Read more.
In the Wall Street Journal, award-winning author Dinaw Mengestu combs the Boulevard St. Germain for remnants of the thriving American ex-pat community that once filled Paris's cafes and he finds a different, quieter city than in the days of Satre, Baldwin or Bellow.
Listen to The New Yorker's fiction podcast, featuring Aleksandar Hemon in conversation with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about Bernard Malamud's short story "A Summer's Reading."
In the first installment of a two-part interview, George Saunders tells Vice that the funny thing about working in an office was that, "the people who were oppressing me were usually pretty nice people and were being oppressed themselves, and would joke about the fact that they were oppressing me and being oppressed."
The Washington Post op-ed columnist, George F. Will, consults Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map to understand why "the development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer." Intrigued? Read more.
Bookslut interviews Aleksandar Hemon about his acclaimed novel, The Lazarus Project, "a prismatic, multi-leveled historical detective novel, Hemon's biggest and best book yet."
Konundrum Engine Literary Review gathers "Some Brief and Frightening Tips from George Saunders" on writing.
Sloane Crosley, author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, reveals her favorite songs and why she listens to stuff she's sick of while she's writing.
Amazon.com names Doug Dorst's forthcoming novel, Alive in Necropolis, in their Best of the Month roundup: "Mix one part gritty police procedural with one part ghost story, add a splash of teen angst and a hefty dose of black humor, and you have Doug Dorst's brilliant debut novela delicious blend of Paul Auster, Kevin Brockmeier, and Joss Whedon."
Junot Díaz reviews the enormously popular video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, in The Wall Street Journal: "Sandbox games (which is a fancy way of saying a game where you can ignore the game's objectives) shot through with criminal aberrance have always been a weakness of mine. Call it the American in me. Call it permanent adolescent."
Lewis Black, author of the newly released Me of Little Faith, shares a moment with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate to discuss his birthday, scientology, and why he hates Hanukah.
Two Riverhead books, Doug Dorst's Alive in Necropolis and David Lida's First Stop in the New World are featured in New York magazine's summer issue: Poolside Seminars.
Jennifer Traig explains the ins and outs of the only disease that is transmissible via television and the internet in Salon.com's exclusive excerpt of her hilarious new memoir Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria.
Entertainment Weekly presents The New Classicsthe 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008, including Riverhead books The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz), Pastoralia (George Saunders), The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini), and High Fidelity (Nick Hornby).
Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake has been optioned by HBO for a series. Gawker discusses...
"Killer Commas" loves the website for Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. "I was going to purchase this anyway but now the website has ultra-energized my enthusiasm for reading it."
ALSO: Omnivoracious, Coudal, and Design Observer
WNYC's Leonard Lopate talks with David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, about why Mexico City may be a preview of the world's urban future.
George Saunders has yet another inspired and inventive story in The New Yorker"Anitheros" is about people who believe they have superpowers and try to exercise them (despite their nonexistence): "A nun in New Mexico whose superpower is the ability to make delicious bread using any ingredients on hand, even mud, even dead bugs, makes a loaf of bread that all the other nuns decline to eat. 'I actually just ate,' one says. 'Honestly, Sister, I have an upset stomach,' protests another."
Slate gives us the best soccer websites and books to read during the Euro 2008 tournament, which includes a Riverhead book: "Perhaps the finestcertainly the stoutestsoccer history ever written is David Goldblatt's 974-page The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, which crams it all in, from the game's ancient prehistory in Tan dynasty China to Zinedine Zidane."
CBS News talks to Pulitzer-Prize winner Junot Díaz about his "Only In America" journey from immigrant to literary phenomenon.
Snarkmarket thinks that "one way to judge the success of a story is to look at how much additional creativity it inspires," and calls on the Constance Eakins book cover gallery on Nathaniel Rich's website as a fun new example.
Update: The cover gallery on Nathaniel Rich's website inspires Bookslut to "get out my colored pencils and make some covers of my own." We look forward to seeing her skillz with the colored pencils.
Best-selling and award-winning author, Nuruddin Farah, reads an excerpt on the Penguin podcast.
Riverhead's John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise and the forthcoming More Information Than You Require, is everywhere: "killing" at BEA, answering revealing questions from Ricky Gervais for his blog, This Side of the Truth, and covering the world of Jack Kirby and comics in The New York Times Book Review.
June 9th's New Yorker features a piece by George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone), who, as a young boy in Catholic school, witnesses a priest and a nun necking: "Having seen what I had seen, in other words, entitled me to cry Hypocrites! and leave religion behind forever."
The New York Times' book blog, Paper Cuts, asks Nathaniel Rich (The Mayor's Tongue) some stray questions. When asked if the Web is a distraction or a blessing, Rich responds: "It's a sweet blessing. I spend many zenlike minutes alternating between reading baseball statistics and looking at photographs of strange sea creatures."
NPR's All Things Considered has a new series called "Three Books" in which they invite writers to recommend three great reads on a single theme. Sloane Crosley tells us her three picks of "luscious books about the beach that you can read on the beach."
Hispanic Magazine praises Riverhead Books: "Edgy and urbane, and boasting some of the leading Hispanic talents in the marketplace, the Riverhead imprint of publishing house Penguin Group USA is emerging as one of the top chroniclers of our experience." See what they have to say about Sylvia Sellers-García's When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, David Lida's First Stop in the New World, and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Riverhead author Nuruddin Farah writes in English in part because Somali was not a written language when he was growing up. Here's a chance to hear his native language from the BBCSomali.
Héctor Tobar, author of Translation Nation, delivered this speech to the 2008 graduating class in the Humanities at Cal State Northridge.
In the wake of his Pulitzer victory, coverage of Junot Díaz is everywhereeven on your television. Click here to catch up with him on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
In his musings on taxonomies for creativity, Roy Christopher "find[s] that The Wu-Tang Manual is a perfect case study of how to build a modern mythology."
People, including Omnivoracious (Amazon.com's blog), are talking about Nathaniel Rich's website and its library of cover art for the mysterious writer, Constance Eakins. A bit odd, perhaps, but then again so is the bookso delightfully odd that according to Los Angeles' well-loved independent bookstore, Book Soup, "Just when we thought this was going to be a bleak year for books The Mayor's Tongue arrived."
In the Louisville Courier-Journal, Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia, ponders the ramifications of the recently-published Kentucky Coal Facts, a document put out by the coal industry, and what the industry's own "facts and statistics" reveal about the state of energy, politics, and democracyand the challenges that lie ahead.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama is visiting the United States this week. Check out his classic titles from Riverhead, including The Art of Happiness.
The National Book Critics Circle admires Riverhead's creative book publicity for Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake. See what the NBCC has to say about the website.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wins the Tournament of Books! Junot Díaz's response to his victory? "I'm beyond humbled...So do I get a T-shirt with that supercool rooster on it? He's bad-ass."
Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten-Year Nap, shares her distinctive take on modern motherhood, ambition, marriage, and explains how she came to write her novel with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
Sloane Crosley cannot manage to have a one-night standbut not for lack of effort. Read an excerpt from I Was Told There'd Be Cake on Salon.com: "By now, time was running out. Another decade and my invitation to the reckless sex-and-drug-abuse club would get revoked. Then people would be compelled to spit words like 'floozy' into my face and they would have every right. It was suggested that perhaps I was not trying hard enough. But I wasn't about to walk into a crowded sports bar and scream, 'I've got twenty minutes and one expired condom. Who's in?' Adventure within reason was key. Still, it seemed that it shouldn't be this hard. Who do you have to sleep with to get laid in this town?"
In the week's New Yorker, George Saunders discusses washboarding: "I believe it is essential, in a free society that finds itself threatened by a ruthless enemy, to distinguish between torture and something pretty irritating. Otherwise, what's next? Are we going to ask the President to ban the act of singing to oneself in a high, tuneless quaver from the next cubicle over? (Hi, Maureen!)"
Business Week ponders the future of manga in the United States and how it might change business books by looking at Daniel H. Pink's trendsetting career guide The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need.
Julie Klam, author of the forthcoming Please Excuse My Daughter, narrates a brush with poverty, philanthropy, and Ann Curry in the Lives column of the New York Times Magazine: "We were two months behind on our rent, and almost everything was going to our high-priced health insurance and the occasional lead-laced Dora toy for our daughter...We weren't where we were supposed to be in life, and with lots of self-pity, I wondered if we ever would be. One thing I wasn't thinking about was philanthropy, unless it was a fund-raiser for me." Read more here.
Sloane Crosley, author of the forthcoming collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, recounts a disastrous day when she was forced to take the bus instead of the subway in The New York Times: "A subway girl at heart, I'm not used to the bus. I worry that I will insert my MetroCard the wrong way and slow everyone down, that the bus puts too much pressure on passengers to be aware of their surroundings, and that the etiquette observed above ground must somehow be more civilized than the etiquette below ground. I find myself giving up my seat not just for the pregnant and the elderly, but for anyone with legs."
In an interview with Radar, Sloane Crosley, author of forthcoming I Was Told There'd Be Cake (excerpted in their April issue), informs us that writers know how to have fun, and "assuming writers are antisocial just plays into some cliché that if you're a writer you should either be J.D. Salinger or J.D. Salinger in a dress." Read the full interview here.
The Christian Science Monitor catches up with Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), who reveals the "ridiculously awesome" books he's reading, what he's watching, and what he's listening to.
Sloane Crosley, author of the forthcoming I Was Told There'd Be Cake, is featured on NPR's "You Must Read This," revealing that the novel, The Secret Garden has its own dark secret. You must listen to this.
David Lida, author of the forthcoming definitive book on Mexico City (on sale May 15th), First Stop in the New World, gives us a taste of what Mexico City has to offer in "Where Everybody Knows Your Nombre."
Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Stephen Marche's Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are official contestants in the Tournament of Books, a "Battle Royale of Literary Excellence"the winner of which will receive a live chicken, um, someday. The tournament begins on March 7th. Read more about this unconventional contest and check out the other contestants.
Update: Junot Díaz and Stephen Marche go head to head in round two. See who moved on to the semifinals.
Update: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao defeats The Savage Detectives in the Zombie Round and advances to the finals.
Check out George Saunders, author of The Braindead Megaphone, in conversation with Israeli writer Etgar Keret in Pen America's March issue. Here is an excerpt of this entertaining exchange.
The National Book Critics Circle reviews Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a NBCC award finalist in fiction) in preparation for the award ceremony which takes place on March 6th at the New School in New York City.
Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and Everything Bad is Good for You, challenges a study done by the National Endowment for the Arts that found reading is on the decline in adults and children. Johnson questions the NEA's exclusion of reading done on the computer: "Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?"
Nathaniel Rich, author of the forthcoming novel The Mayor's Tongue, muses on the ever-changing New York City from a native's perspective in The New York Times: "Only later that night, when I looked up at Times Square, did I stop to admire the museum that Manhattan has become. The hysterical wattage of the billboards had turned the night sky over Broadway a pale bluea kind of artificial, perpetual dusk into which the New York I once knew has floated, never to return. I watch that New York float farther away all the time, marveling at the sparkle, but relieved to live in a different city."
Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, talks to The Wall Street Journal about how new voices can get heard.
Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (cover design by Rodrigo Corral, art directed by Lisa Amoroso) was selected as one of the "Seven of Oh Seven"the seven best book covers of 2007.
Evictions, first book tours, and more...Jami Attenberg, author of The Kept Man, writes about it all for one week on MySpace.com.
Amazon.com's blog, Omnivoracious, has introduced a new "best of the month" feature that showcases editors' favorite books. January's list includes David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round, "a gigantic and fascinating history of a subject that deserves (but has never gotten) such a thing."
Update: Amazon.com interviews David Goldblatt.
Listen to David Goldblatt, author of The Ball is Round, on Champion Soccer Radio Network, discussing the politics of soccer with Peter Brown.
Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, talks about what it means to be a ghetto nerd in this interview with CW11 Morning News. Watch it here.
Fantasy Book Critic, a website dedicated to providing in-depth coverage on the many different facets of speculative fiction including fantasy, science fiction, and horror, included Heaven's Net Is Wide by Lian Hearn as a Favorite Book of 2007.
In The Areas of my Expertise, John Hodgman shares some useful "hobo signs"illustrations that you can look for in your town or city that indicate a hobo presence. And there's even a website where you can report a hobo sign spotting. But one Hodgman fan recently took the love of the hobo sign to a new level; check out Dregboy's literal "tramp stamp".
Update: Mr. Hodgman weighs in: "WHILE THIS LEAVES ME SPEECHLESS, and it obviously deserves recognition, as Dregboy has ruined his life, I DO NOT ENCOURAGE YOU PEOPLE TO GET TATTOOS."
David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round is the one essential book for any soccer fan. And ESPN Soccernet is giving it away right now! Enter to win soccer's "definitive book" here.
Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, wrote an op-ed piece for Louisville, KY's Courier-Journal, called "2007: A Year of Recognition." It's one of those rare well-written articles about the environment that is full of hope rather than despair and blame. Read the full article here.
Read "Alma" in the Dec. 24th issue of The New Yorker, a new story by Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
E! Online's "The Books You Must Read: Picks for 2007" includes Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Plus, Riverhead authors Will Beall and Sloane Crosley share their picks. Check out the list here.
The cover of Wired magazine's manga issue features an in-depth look at manga culture by Daniel H. Pink, business guru and author of A Whole New Mind and the forthcoming first-ever manga career guide, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Pink goes inside the culture of manga and explores how this dynamic pop art form has come to shape Japan's booming entertainment industry. Also in this issue, Pink takes a minute to chat with Jun Nakazawa about what makes a "manga mind." Read the cover story and more here.
Bestselling author Amir Aczel gives a great interview with Ira Flatow on NPR's Science Fridays. Aczel chats with Ira about the controversy around the life and work of scientist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, the subject of his newest book, The Jesuit and the Skull. Listen in.
Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was voted Best Book of 2007 by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family, in the National Book Critic Circle's new best recommended list. Here's what she had to say about the title she voted for.
George Saunders' essay "Soviet Deadpan," about Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, ran on the back page of the New York Times Book Review. Saunders says that "Kharms's stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they're defective," and further believes that "weirdness this deep seems more likely to stem from an aesthetic crisis than a political one." Read more here.
George Saunders, author of The Braindead Megaphone, traveled to Africa with Bill Clinton to write the cover story for GQ's Men of the Year issue. The story's not online, but you can read a Saunders&Clinton Q&A here. There's also a slideshow of photos by Brigitte Lacombe from Clinton's African tour.
The Book Design Review shares its favorite book covers of 2007, which includes Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, designed by Ben Gibson. See the other covers and vote for your favorite here.
Need a holiday gift for a foodie friend? Food blog hookedonheat.com suggests Alone in the Kitchen with An Eggplant.
Slate's literary editor Meghan O'Rourke interviews Junot Díaz, covering everything from the act of writing and the structure of his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, to what it means to be a "Latino writer." Check out the interview here.
Salon.com names Riverhead authors Ira Glass and Junot Díaz as two of the Sexiest Men Living 2007. See why Salon thinks these literary men are brimming with sex appeal.
LAPD officer and author of L.A. Rex, Will Beall, discusses how Evel Knievel teaches us the value of liberty. Read the Los Angeles Times article here. Also, Beall talks to Dan Rather on Dan Rather Reports about gang members who enlist in the army and return from duty to the streets with military training and access to weapons. Watch the show online here.
On the eve of the publication of the paperback edition of the Gorillaz illustrated autobiograpy, Rise of the Ogre, and the release of band's new album, D-Sides, Murdoc Nicalls, the animated band's irrepressible front-man, hosted a chat on Facebook and talked about the book, the music, and all things Gorillaz. You can read the transcript hereand become Facebook friends with Murdoc here.
The puppet show version of George Saunders' "Ask the Optimist" from his book The Braindead Megaphonepreviously referred to on this site as "completely insane") has been selected by the Youtube editors as a Featured Video in the Comedy categoryand it's already up over 100,000 views. Check it out.
The Leaning Toward Wisdom blog calls the website for Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map "perhaps the coolest website ever done for a book." See what you think...
Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, reflects on how "Thelma and Louise" is a different movie experience today than it was in 1991. Read "Thelma and Louise" in the Rear-View Mirror in the New York Times.
Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map, blogs in the New York Times about the extraordinary developments in the design and technology of city life. Read We'll All Take Manhattan.
Shalom Auslander, author of the forthcoming Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir, writes an op-ed about sweat in the New York Times.
The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders is the September featured book on MySpace.
Patrick Neate, author of Where You're At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet, which won the 2004
National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, writes about breaking up with hip-hop on the NBCC blog, Critical Mass.
Steven Johnson visited Clemson University where he gave a lecture to the entire freshman class about his book
The Ghost Map which was selected as the
required summer reading for all incoming freshman.
Read about his visit here.
Novelist Nicola Griffith spends a week blogging on the litblog co-op about how gender factors into where a book is shelved in the bookstore and more. Read "Girl Cooties" and Griffith's other pieces
here.
The New Yorker magazine's summer fiction issue contains an excerpt from Junot Díaz's long-awaited novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which Riverhead will publish
in September. The excerpt's not online, but they do have a podcast up featuring Edwidge Danticat talking
about Diaz's 1995 short story, "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)," along with Diaz reading the story, which they've also posted
online.
Following quickly on Michael Connelly's praise for Will Beall's L.A. Rex, Joseph Wambaugh has just weighed in, too: "L.A. Rex is to the 21st century noir thriller what
Apocalypse Now was to 20th century war movies: vivid, powerful, imaginative, unique. It melds a dreamlike fable with graphic reality, and showcases a gifted new author with
his own stylistic vision, cinematic descriptive power, and natural writing chops that will astonish critics and public alike." Wow.
Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah (most recently the author of Knots) has a piece "My Life as a Diplomat" on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, detailing his role trying to broker peace between the Islamists and Somali government before Ethiopia intervened, and explains what he thinks the future bears for war-torn Somalia.
Larry J. Kolb recently appeared on Al Jazeera's English-language channel to discuss his book America at Night. You can watch it here, and see what the political blogs have to say here. And be sure to check out all of Kolb's documentation of his scandalous story at the America at Night website.
Jennifer Belle has just launched her home on the web, jenniferbelle.com. It's stuffed full of information about her new novel Little Stalker and the old favorites,
plus a lot, lot more, including a can't-miss timeline of incriminating photos. She's also blogging at the site.
The LitBlog Co-op has selected Nicola Griffith's Always as one of the three nominees for the their summer 2007 READ THIS! Selection. The discussion is just beginning...
The Saunders Army that hardcore group of George Saunders fans who (much to our delight) has taken it upon themselves to spread the gospel of George has recently launched a MySpace page under the leadership of the mysterious General (we've even talked to the General on the phone and still...mysterious). They've already got more friends than we've ever had. Join 'em?
There's a new highly reputable institution on the Internet: JS Spenser. Operating under the mottos of "We'll Do Anything For a Fee" and "It's Not Illegal, But Its Close," JS Spenser appears to have been founded by Dana Vachon, author of the much-talked-about debut novel Mergers & Acquisitions. Dana's also blogging
Michael Connelly just chimed in on Will Beall's first novel: "L.A. Rex is a stunning debut. A gritty tale dripping with truth it could only have come from a writer who has lived the life. I can't wait for the next one." The book came out in hardcover at the end of last year, and is coming in paperback this fall. You can read more about it here.