Today (May 2nd, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: Everything I Never Told You

“What happens when a family constellation loses a star? Do the others fall out of orbit or pull closer together? When sixteen-year-old Lydia disappears, her Chinese-American father and American mother can barely speak to one another. Lydia’s brother and younger sister try to stay below the radar. Each of them knows something about Lydia’s life—the pressure to be someone she’s not, to live the life in science that slipped through her mother’s grasp, to be popular, not an outsider like her father. And what does their wild neighbor Jack know about Lydia—was he really the last to see her? So many secrets, so many questions—personal struggles, cultural struggles, and a tragic mystery to solve, this is a compulsively readable debut.”  – Gail Vinett, Ingram Content Group

A Short Q & A With Celeste Ng

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?  

Although this book isn’t at all autobiographical, I – like most writers – drew on my life for many of the details. I furnished the Lees’ house of the late 1970s with some of the things I remembered from childhood: rotary phones with cords that I used to coil round my pinky; a record player with an arm weighted by a stack of pennies; the alarm clock whose numbers literally turned over with a little click. On a macro level, when I was growing up, my family was one of the only Asian families in our community, much like the Lee family in the novel, so I drew on that experience of being culturally – and visually – different from everyone around you.

More interesting, maybe, is some of the stuff I had to make up. My parents were both scientists, and they gave me a lot of science-related books, just as Marilyn does with Lydia – though it didn’t have the same effect on me, thankfully. I wanted to give Lydia the exact books I’d had as a kid – like Nobel Prize Women in Science and I Will Be a Doctor!: The Story of America’s First Woman Physician – but I couldn’t: they weren’t published until the late ’80s or early ’90s, or even later. In fact, I couldn’t find any real books from the 1960s or 1970s that a mother might give her daughter to make her think a career in medicine, or any sciences, was even a possibility. So I had to make up all of the science books in the novel. It was a startling reminder of how different things were for women just a generation ago.

What is the title of your book? Why?  

My novel is called Everything I Never Told You – it came to me during the first draft, when I was roughing out the final scene of the book; it’s an echo of one of the very last lines. It struck me as just the right title for a book that’s about the secrets family members keep from each other, and the gnawing, futile desire to piece together a loved one’s life after they’ve died.

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

There are a lot, but here are the big ones: The God of Small Things really shook up my notions of how you could zigzag through time to tell a story, and showed me just how pliable language can be. It’s amazing. The Known World opened me up to a lot of possibilities about how history – or imagined history – could intersect with fiction. And pretty much everything Gish Jen has written, from Who’s Irish to The Love Wife to Tiger Writing, makes me think harder about how I tackle issues of culture clash, race, and identity.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

As a kid I first wanted to be a paleontologist, then an investigative journalist (a la Lois Lane). At various points in my life, I’ve made a living as a proofreader and a miniaturist – no, for real, I made scale miniatures, mostly of food. It all sounds random, but the common link is an obsession with details: whether it’s painstakingly excavating fossils, doggedly uncovering facts, meticulously correcting punctuation, or sculpting veins into a lettuce leaf smaller than a dime, the small stuff has always been important to me. That carries over into my writing as well – I love the telling detail, and I love arranging those details to make a larger picture. So if I weren’t a writer, maybe I’d be a nanoscientist, or a watchmaker. Or a Lego Master Builder! Really, anything where I got to use the small stuff to make the big stuff.

More About Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng is the author of the forthcoming novel Everything I Never Told You (June 2014, Penguin Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in One Story, Five Chapters, Gulf Coast, the Bellevue Literary Review, The Millions, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere, and she has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Hopwood Award, and a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan) and has taught writing at the University of Michigan and Grub Street in Boston.  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find her on her website, Twitter and Facebook.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

“In Everything I Never Told You, all of the characters wrestle with expectations about how they should lead their lives – read about the novel here. Was there ever a time when you struggled with your parents’ expectations for you?”

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One winner will win one signed copy of Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on May 2nd, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (May 1st, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Courtney Maum’s novel I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

“Antic, sexy, satirically deft, and of course funny, this novel is also, on both the personal and political levels, smart about the bottomlessness of our capacities for self-sabotage, and moving about the fierceness of our yearning to make good.” – Jim Shepard

 

A Short Q & A With Courtney Maum

What is the title of your book? Why?

The title is I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You. It’s a long title, to be sure, and one I had to fervently convince the team to keep. The title alludes to the mind state of a depressed person in denial as to the reasons for their sadness. It’s about that moment, post-break-up, at 2am in some bar when you realize that the game face you’ve had on all evening is coming off. The title also preps people for the novel’s dark humor. If you don’t like the title, you probably won’t like the book!

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

I have a favorite paragraph from the end of Chapter 4:

“But no one tells you what you start doing to each other when you wed. People talk about the stability and the comfort of knowing that you have someone who will always have your back; they speak of the convenience of pooled assets and tax benefits and the joy of raising children, but no one explains that six years into it, a simple request to Pick up a half pound of ground turkey and maybe some organic leeks? on your way home is going to send the free, blue sky crashing down like a pillory around your neck, see you clutching your paper number at the butcher’s, ashamed to be just another sucker bringing white meat home.”

When did you first know you were a writer?

When I was seven. I started putting my short stories in these stapled, laminated books with an “About the Author” section at the end. That kind of inflated belief in my own self-importance definitely set me up for the writing life, a mostly one-sided endeavor in which you have to say ‘yes’ to yourself against decades of other people’s ‘no’s.’

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

The first time I read Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth, I specifically remember thinking, holy crap, you can do that in a novel? I had the same experience when I read This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M Holmes. Female writers do funny really well: I’m thinking specifically of Lorrie Moore, Deborah Eisenberg, Nora Ephron, and Lynne Tillman. But Homes does funny without too much neuroticism, and Unferth is just…there’s so much joyful despair in what she writes. You just want to sit all of her work down on your couch and hug it and feed it soup and then have too much whiskey with it.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

I work as a brand strategist and corporate namer for several different agencies on the side of my own personal writing, and I really love this work. If I wasn’t doing any of these things, I think I could have had a nice run as a hair stylist. I love cutting hair.

More About Courtney Maum

Courtney Maum is the humor columnist behind the “Celebrity Book Review” series on Electric Literature, an advice columnist for Tin House, and the author of the chapbook “Notes from Mexico,” from The Cupboard Press. She splits her time among the Berkshires, New York City, and Paris, working as a creative brand strategist, corporate namer, and humor columnist. Visit her at her Tumblr or on Twitter, and, in lieu of a book trailer, check out the marriage proposal video her French husband made for her ten years ago, which encompasses many of the same themes as the novel.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

On Maum’s Twitter feed, she claims to be a “friend” to chocolate milk. What’s your favorite beverage and what do you love about it?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Courtney Maum’s novel I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on May 1st, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (April 30th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Brian Gresko’s anthology When I First Held You. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: When I First Held You

“Full of humor, heart, and brilliance, When I First Held You contains everything I wish I’d known (but probably wasn’t ready to hear) about fatherhood before I became a father. Over and over again, as I read the essays Brian Gresko has deftly gathered here, I wanted to grab my wife, my son, and even strangers on the train and point emphatically at one line or another to say, ‘This! This is what it’s like.’ The failures and triumphs of fatherhood have never sounded better than they do in the words of these fine writers.” – Kristopher Jansma, author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

A Short Q & A With Brian Gresko

What is the title of your book? Why?

The title When I First Held You comes from the cliché that women feel like mothers when they find out they are pregnant, but for men the feeling of fatherhood doesn’t hit until they first hold their child, that’s when it becomes real. It’s an image that appears in several of the essays, and without my prompting the authors to include it.

More personally, it comes from something my father said to me. I’m talking about John, my adoptive dad. John had been engaged to my mom, twice, but they broke it off, and later she became pregnant with this other guy’s kid. He was a teenager who didn’t want the responsibility of fatherhood. My mom turned to John for support and friendship, and slowly they rekindled their relationship, though of course there was uncertainty about whether it would work out. John said that despite those worries, when he first held me, he knew that he would stick around, that he wanted to be there to see me grow up.

The title plays out for me in another way as well. The intense emotional reality of fatherhood didn’t come over me until my son grabbed my finger with his little hand for the first time, when he was hooked up to monitors, intubated in the NICU recovering from a traumatic birth. So that phrase, when I first held you, refers to both my dad and my son holding me. And damn if I don’t feel like a baby a lot of the time, emotionally, being carried into emotional landscapes and new understandings of myself by the people I love; in particular, at this point in my life, by my little boy.

What were the seeds of this book?

I was writing about parenting for The Huffington Post, which led to work for an AOL Patch site, and eventually Babble, where I still write. But in the course of my MFA I had conducted a few author interviews, and after graduating I placed those pieces, which led to conducting other interviews and penning reviews and critical essays. So I had my feet in two worlds: the parenting and the literary. My agent, the remarkable Erin Harris at Folio Literary Agency, asked if there was a way to combine the two, and wondered if I might interview authors about fatherhood. Over the course of a brainstorming dinner this evolved into the idea of an anthology. I have her to thank for getting the project started. Like all good agents, she had a better, longer view of my work then I was able to have down in the sentence trenches.

When did you first know you were a writer?

I continue to find new answers to this question, which maybe sounds a little weird, but I’ve been shy about calling myself a writer. Partly because I’m insecure and feel like I can’t put myself in the same category of the writers whom I admire, but also because I come from a working class background where what you earn and own is valued, and it’s so damn hard making money writing that I sometimes feel like it’s a really time-consuming hobby. Also, while I am a grown-up parent who writes, I tend to put quotation marks around all of those terms in my mind. I feel like I still have so much to learn! And identifying myself as a writer (or a grown-up, or even a parent) carries a sort of security and confidence that I don’t always feel.

Because of that, for about three years I called myself a stay-at-home dad first and a writer second. It wasn’t until after the anthology proposal sold that I reversed that order. And still the goalposts keep moving down the field, as I dream of publishing a novel, and short stories, and then I’m sure I’ll aspire to other forms of recognition. Writing is something I do, but being a writer is something else. Before writing I taught middle school, and before that I produced websites, so part of me still hesitates from thinking that this is it, that I am “a writer” and that I won’t end up trying my hand at something else either because I get tired of it or, more likely, out of economic necessity.

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

This is an easy one for me to answer – editing this collection was like taking a master class in essay writing. I had little idea what each contributor was going to write until the essay came into my inbox. I used to tell people that receiving their essays was like getting a gift, but the real gift was in working with these guys, all very dedicated, brilliant wordsmiths, to polish their pieces for the book. I got a little buzz being that close to their process; it was so instructive to see the decisions being made over drafts, even the slight adjustments in the copyediting. Now when I’m working I hear their voices in my head, encouraging me to try something new, or open up full throttle emotionally, or loosen up and be a bit more playful, more bold. The editing made me a better writer, and I’ll always be personally grateful to the contributors for trusting me enough to let me into their process.

More About Brian Gresko

Brian Gresko is the editor of the anthology When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood, out May 6th from Berkley Books/Penguin. His work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Glimmer Train Stories, and Slice Literary Magazine, and on The Huffington Post, Salon, The Atlantic.com, The Daily Beast, The Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Babble. Brian lives with his family in Brooklyn. You can find him on his website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

The contributors to When I First Held You write about the transformative experience of becoming fathers – read more about the book here. What is an experience that has transformed you?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Brian Gresko’s anthology When I First Held You. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 30th, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (April 29th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Porochista Khakpour’s novel, The Last Illusion. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

 

“An audaciously ambitious novel that teeters along a tightrope but never falls off.

“Following her well-received debut (Sons and Other Flammable Objects, 2007), this Iranian-American novelist returns with what on the surface is a coming-of-age story about a boy who was raised as a bird, based on a myth from the Persian Book of Kings (which finds its way into the story within this story) about an Icarus who becomes a great warrior and hero. The protagonist of this novel is neither. His name is Zal (it rhymes with “fall,” which is what happens to those who cannot fly), and he was born in Iran, very pale and blond in a country of darker skins, to a mother who considered him a mistake and a “White Demon.” His birth sparked his “mother’s disintegration into a crazy bird lady,” and she raised him in a menagerie, as a bird. The tone then shifts, or slides, from once-upon-a-time fable into something closer to American realism, as the setting shifts to New York City around the turn of the millennium. Zal has been adopted by a behavioral analyst who wants to help him develop the human side of his adolescent personality and guide him into adulthood. Zal learns to “keep the bird in him, any bird in him, so deep within himself that it resurfaced only rarely”—though he does retain an appetite for insects and develops a crush on a particularly comely canary (“tiny but still voluptuous, round in all the right places”). In a coincidence that strains credulity, he happens to meet an artist who works with dead birds, who becomes his first love and is something of a strange bird herself. She suffers from anorexia, panic attacks and premonitions, the last of which proves crucial and tragic. And he encounters an illusionist who sparks the novel’s title, planning to make New York disappear: “Not New York, exactly, but the New Yorkness of New York.”

“Plot summary fails to convey the spirit of this creative flight of fancy; farce meets disaster in a novel that illuminates what it means to be human, normal and in love.” — Kirkus, Starred Review

A Short Q & A With Porochista Khakpour

What is the title of your book? Why?

The Last Illusion. It is both literal—a magician’s final illusion before retirement—and figurative, which I will leave to the reader to discover.

What were the seeds of this book?

My father read me stories from the Shahnameh/the Persian Book of Kings (the national epic of Iran, composed over 1000 years ago) and the story of Zal, the boy raised by a bird, always stuck to me as the most thrilling outsider narrative. Around the same time, David Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty disappearing act aired on television and that also moved me greatly—as a recent immigrant I remember imposing a sort of symbolism on it that may or may not have been part of the illusion. These two influences—along with Robert Penn Warren’s  poetic sequence Audubon: A Vision, a text that I feel saved my life in my 20s—combined in my head to create something altogether new even to me.

Was there a particular moment that this book became its own beast, outside of you?

It seems to have always been. I followed Toni Morrison’s advice of writing the book I always wanted to read (a bad paraphrase) but I was always a bit in awe of this story, as if I was channeling it at most, that it existed always on some outside plane alongside my life. I saw all the visuals in a sort  of part-comic part-Miyazaki animation in my head.

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

This is a hard question that makes me all sort of neurotic but maybe “Earthworms, budworms, mealworms, army worms, ants, wood borers, weevils, mosquitoes, caterpillars, houseflies, moths, gnats, beetles, grubs, spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, termites, cicadas, bees, wasps, any larvae—for starters.” Or “I hate art” (his words, not mine).

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?

It’s a mainly fabulist story, but a friend of mine called this my memoir—every character is a version of me, especially my bird boy.

When did you first know you were a writer?

Age 4. We were fleeing Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war and I entertained my parents and myself on a journey across three continents with stories. Books became my one and only entertainment and I often I had to create them to have them. I never stopped.

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

I don’t know if they have made me think about my writing in new ways exactly, but they certainly are books I love and can see as potential relatives of The Last Illusion (the reading group guide includes these):

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy Snow Bird

Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners

Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea

Jose Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night

Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Leaf Storm 

Are there any writers featured in this giveaway with whom you have a strong friendship? How did you meet that person? How do you support each other’s work?

I greatly admire all of the writers, but I know only personally know Scott Cheshire (High as the Horses’ Bridle); Julia Fierro (Cutting Teeth); Roxane Gay (An Untamed State); Edan Lepucki (California); and Joanna Rakoff (My Salinger Year). I feel so lucky to share this season and this year with such outstanding talents who happen to be wonderful people.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

I don’t do anything but teach and write and hang out with my dog, but I do wish I could be a full-time investigative journalist perhaps. Or a “hacktivist.” Or produce the journal my dear friend, the late Maggie Estep and I dreamed of creating, Dog Lady Magazine.

More About Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour is the author of the debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove, 2007)—the 2007 California Book Award winner in “First Fiction,” a Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and New York Times “Editor’s Choice”—and the forthcoming The Last Illusion, a Most Anticipated Book of 2014 according to Flavorwire, the Millions, and the Huffington Post. She has received fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, Ucross, Sewanee Writers Conference, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, and many others. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, Elle, Spin, and other publications. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia, Fordham, and Wesleyan. You can find her website, Facebook and Twitter.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

“The cover of The Last Illusion features the work of Ali Banisadr – see the cover here. What visual image would you want on the cover of your book?”

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One winner will win one signed copy of Porochista Khakpour’s novel The Last Illusion. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 29th, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (April 28th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: An Untamed State

“Clear your schedule now! Once you start this book, you will not be able to put it down. An Untamed State is a novel of hope intermingled with fear, a book about possibilities mixed with horror and despair. It is written at a pace that will match your racing heart, and while you find yourself shocked, amazed, devastated, you also dare to hope for the best, for all involved.” – Edwidge Danticat

A Short Q & A With Roxane Gay

What were the seeds of this book?

An Untamed State began as a short story, “Things I Know About Fairy Tales.” Long after the story had been published, these characters, the circumstances that made the story possible, stayed with me and I had to write more of the story.

Was there a particular moment that this book became its own beast, outside of you?

The deeper I got into the writing of this novel, the more I felt it in my bones and then, I felt it even somewhere deeper. I was fully immersed and even made myself cry at times as I wrote. That’s when I knew the novel had taken on a life of its own, had become a beast that is, like the novel itself, untamed.

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

During Mireille’s kidnapping, she tries to make herself forget her life and everything she has loved. I’m proud of how I wrote through this act of forgetting.

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

Lately I’ve been re-reading and thinking a lot about Zadie Smith’s NW, because it is such a polyphonic wonder. Her writing, and that book in particular, make me think anything is possible in my own work.

More About Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy culture blog, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK and essays editor for The Rumpus. Her novel, An Untamed State, will be published by Grove Atlantic and her essay collection, Bad Feminist, will be published by Harper Perennial, both in 2014. You can find her on her website, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

On her Tumblr, Roxane Gay often writes about meals she is cooking. What is your favorite comfort food to prepare for yourself and/or your loved ones?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 28th, 2014. Read the complete rules.