Coming to Town: Stuart Rojstaczer for The Mathematician's Shiva

Posted on 2014-09-08 at 13:39 by montsamu

"Her craziness was happily wed to her intellect. There are no reasonable geniuses in this world, I am convinced." So writes middle-aged fictional geophysicist Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch of his mother, within the pages of actual geophysicist Stuart Rojstaczer's debut novel The Mathematician's Shiva. A brilliant mathematician, Rachela is rumored to be taking the secret proof to the Navier-Stokes equation to her grave. But first, and trust me, somehow this all works, Rojstaczer gives us alternating scenes of heartbreak and humor, introducing Rachela on her deathbed along with her fantastically weird family. As the story continues, a parade of mathematicians will arrive to poke around her house in search of her last work, but there is so much more than the ongoing narrative at work: Rojstaczer employs chapters recalling Sasha's youth, learning mathematics at his father's hand, complete with diagrams and historical context -- "Leo" in one of his father's instructional stories turns out to be Leonhardt Euler -- as well as excerpts from Rachela's memoir A Lifetime in Mathematics, chronicling her Jewish family's flight from the rise of Hitler. If this is beginning to sound too heady or heavy, a brief remark: even the chapter titles contain bits of humor. And if you pause to take a sip of vodka as often as Rachela's younger brother Shlomo...

Rojstaczer, a long-time professor at Duke University now living in California, will be at Durham's The Regulator Bookshop this Thursday, September 11, at 7 pm for a reading and signing event. Via email, he answered some questions about his book and his background in reading and writing.

Q: You and "Sasha" are both Wisconsin-born geophysicists, the son of Polish-Jewish post-WW2 immigrants. Do the similarities end there, or is there any shared familial or other background of yours which you were able to use to inform the character and his family?

Sasha is older I am, has a bit stronger Eastern European roots, is more arrogant, is a better mathematician, and is a lifelong skirt-chaser. He's an amalgam of people I know and love and sure, there's more than a little of me in Sasha. You can only act so much in creating a character. There's at least a little of me in all of the characters in this novel. Originally, the family in this novel was going to be Hungarian. But I quickly realized I knew nothing about Hungarian culture. In contrast, I know about Polish and Russian Jewish culture intimately. It's a bitter fit. Grounding this novel in a culture I know emotionally and intellectually gives it necessary and vital authenticity, I think.

Q: A novel with (even sparse!) mathematical formulae and graphs seems that it could be a hard sell, particularly for a debut novelist. Was this the case at all?

Posted in Coming to Town | Tagged Stuart Rojstaczer, the mathematician's shiva, the regulator bookshop

Coming to Town, belated edition: Lev Grossman at Flyleaf Books for The Magician's Land

Posted on 2014-09-07 at 03:23 by montsamu

Lev Grossman was recently in the Carolinas for a stop on his tour for The Magician's Land, which debuted on the NY Times bestseller list at #1. At a "standing room only" event at Flyleaf Books, he talked about The Magicians and The Magician King, read from The Magician's Land, and engaged in a lively Q&A session with the audience. Since, he has also just appeared at The Bookmarks Festival of Books and Authors in Winston-Salem; previously, he was a guest of the North Carolina Literary Festival in April, as well as previous book tour stops (for The Magician King in August 2011 at Flyleaf Books, and for The Magicians paperback release in June 2010 at Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville). From the road, he took the time for an email interview, after which I've included my review of The Magician's Land.

[caption id="attachment_3751" align="alignnone" width="278"] At Flyleaf Books, August 2014[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3750" align="alignnone" width="262"] At the North Carolina Literary Festival, April 2014[/caption]

Q: You've been to North Carolina quite a few times in the past few years. Any particularly fond memories of your readings or other events?

Really my fondest memory is of going out for BBQ after a reading with a bunch of boisterous nerds. In New York City one is always haunted by the sense that one's BBQ is not truly authentic ... now I know that this is true.

Q: In a recent appearance on NPR's Ask Me Another you mentioned almost in passing that after 10 years writing these characters, you're ready to move on. Any hints yet about what you might be moving on to?

Posted in Coming to Town | Tagged flyleaf books, lev grossman, the magician's land

September newsletter: John Hodgman, tiltExpo, HMLT, Stuart Rojstaczer, Kim Harrison, John Darnielle, The Escapism Film Festival, Scott Westerfeld, and more!

Posted on 2014-09-05 at 10:00 by montsamu

Vol 4. No 9. September 5, 2014: The first Friday of the month has no fewer than five events to pique your interest, and the first week of the month has already brought the first of five six! seven! new books by North Carolina authors that will hit stores in September.

Let's start with those events happening today (Friday, September 5):

• While most festival events are on Saturday and are free, the Bookmarks Festival in Winston-Salem, NC does have a pair of ticketed "Eat and Greet" sessions on Friday, with authors Lisa Leake and Rita Mae Brown. (The Saturday lineup includes Lev Grossman, Tiphanie Yanique, Maggie Stiefvater, Morowa Yejidé, Margaret Stohl, and Jen McConnel, among many others.)
• Running Friday through Sunday,  The Escapist Expo returns as tiltExpo — “Triangle Game Initiative (TGI), producer of the East Coast Game Conference – will bring a new consumer event, tiltExpo, to the Durham Convention Center this September 5th, 6th, and 7th.” Guests include Bob Chipman, Chewie Slate, Rich Perrotta, Mating Habits of the Modern Geek, and the UNC "Humans vs Zombies" team, and programming includes open gaming, panels, a costume contest, and an accompanying music festival.
• At 7 pm, DSI Comedy in Chapel Hill hosts a superhero-themed night of improv battle: "This Friday, six courageous comedians (Power Up!) will face their arch-nemeses Pantie Raid in an epic Cage Match battle! Using a super power based on YOUR suggestions, watch as they soar to new heights of comedy. Will our heroes emerge victorious in their fight against their lingerie-loving foes? Only YOU can decide."
• At 8 pm, Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern presents "HMLT: a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet" at Durham's Oval Park outdoor amphitheatre (1100 Oakland Ave) at 8 pm -- "With a focus on the disintegration of two powerful families, Little Green Pig brings its signature intensity to Shakespeare’s masterpiece about the pathology of denial."
• Also at 8 pm -- The Carolina Theatre of Durham presents John Hodgman with special guest David Rees: "John Hodgman is a writer, humorist, geek celebrity, former professional literary agent and expert on all world knowledge. He was the bumbling PC in Apple's long-running "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ad campaign."

Posted in newsletter | Tagged clay and susan griffith, david drake, Escapism Film Festival, james maxey, jason mott, jenna black, John Darnielle, john hodgman, kim harrison, lewis shiner, lisa shearin, matt ross, Scott Westerfeld, Stuart Rojstaczer, tiltExpo, tony daniel, william gibson

Paul Kincaid's From the Other Side, August 2014: New books from NewCon and Beccon, and two sf novels getting serious mainstream attention

Posted on 2014-09-03 at 14:35 by montsamu

From the Other Side, August 2014

By Paul Kincaid

[Editor's Note: "From the Other Side" is Paul Kincaid's monthly column on books and news from the other side of the Atlantic.]

So the biggest science fiction event in Britain has come and gone. For the record, I thought Capaldi makes a very interesting Doctor, but Moffatt remains a terrible scriptwriter. It seems to me that Doctor Who is going the way of Sherlock: glitzy and full of in-references for the fans, but rather short of coherent storytelling and convincing characterisation.

Oh, and we also had a Worldcon. Actually, by any measure, Loncon 3 was a raging success: more members and more attendees than any previous Worldcon; a more varied membership in terms of age, gender, nationality, than any big convention I’ve known; and probably the most intelligent and engaging programming you could hope to find. It also provided a stage for a couple of very interesting book launches.

NewCon Press launched a stack of books there, of which the most interesting, to my mind, is Nina Allan’s first full-length novel, The Race. Already the winner of a BSFA Award, for her novella Spin, and a Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for the translation of The Silver Wind, there is quite a lot of expectation about this novel. Opening in a near-future, post-catastrophe Britain it nests fiction within reality, reality within fiction with an assurance that will be familiar to any readers of her shorter fiction, yet which is still designed to challenge and exhilarate the reader. As one fine review puts it: ‘Readers with a kink for understatement, alienation, and locution will be at home’. Nina Allan has promised for some time to be one of the most interesting of the new generation of British writers, and with The Race she starts to fulfil that promise.

Posted in From the Other Side | Tagged david mitchell, howard jacobson, ian whates, john clute, nina allen, paradox, paul kincaid, stay, the bone clocks, the race

The Hardest Part: Lou Anders on Frostborn

Posted on 2014-08-25 at 14:01 by montsamu

In his ten years and counting tenure at Pyr, award-winning editor and art director Lou Anders has been on the other side of the desk from many fantastic fantasy novels and their authors, from James Enge's Blood of Ambrose to Clay and Susan Griffith's Vampire Empire and Allen Steele's Apollo's Outcasts, he's made suggestions and fought for cuts and rewrites. As he writes here, he intended to (and in fact did) approach writing a novel with a willingness to revise to sell, but something happened along the way that turned the editing process into the hardest part of seeing his debut novel, Frostborn, published. Frostborn is the first book in Anders's "Thrones and Bones" series for young readers, "a thoroughly enjoyable Viking-infused middle grade fantasy for boys and girls and their parents, with a winning combination of board gaming, frost giants, barrow mounds, and (of course!) dragons; fairly equal parts The Hobbit and (yes!) The Lion King with How to Train Your Dragon and The Black Cauldron flavoring atop a foundation of board games." (Quoting myself, reviewing the audiobook elsewhere.) I'm already indebted to Lou for his kind words about Bull Spec early on, and for giving me the time for an in-depth, at-length interview in Bull Spec #4, and I hope you're as interested here in what he has to say as I was.

By Lou Anders:

When I wrote my first manuscript, the agent I was courting put me through an intense rewrite before he would agree to take me on and another one after he did. I told him I’d do anything to get it where it needed to be, and at one point we were debating having me rewrite the entire book to take it from third person to first person.

When I wrote my second manuscript, having already put it through several rewrites, I rewrote the entire thing to alter it from a young adult to a middle grade novel at the behest of an editor who thought she would be able to pick it up if I did.

My motto was “do what it takes to sell” and don’t be precious about anything.

Posted in The Hardest Part, Uncategorized | Tagged frostborn, lou anders, thrones and bones

The Exploding Spaceship Recommends Some Good UK Books for US Holiday-goers

Posted on 2014-08-16 at 21:21 by angelablackwell

This column features some good reads for all ages which are not currently available in the US.  Many US fans are traveling to the UK for conventions and holidays during the summer months so Your Humble Reviewers thought to provide some suggestions for book souvenirs and gifts.

For the middle grades, we highly recommend The Book of Beasts (paperback from Head of Zeus) by John and Carole Barrowman which is the third volume in their Hollow Earth trilogy. The first two books are available in the US, but volume three has not reached the American side of the Atlantic yet.  These books are very fast-paced fantasy adventures featuring twins who magically animate through their art. They are set on an island off the coast of Scotland (it doesn’t really exist but features of it come from real Scottish places).  The third volume sees the twins separated for most of the book, and so makes the characters change quite a bit and grow in unexpected ways. This is our favorite currently ongoing middle grades series.  The pacing and excitement make this a good choice for reluctant readers and since the twins are Emily and Matt, it is a good choice for either sex. Plotting is good enough that older teens and adults will enjoy it too. And yes, if you Doctor Who and Torchwood fans thought the name was familiar, that is the actor who plays Captain Jack Harkness and his older sister who write the series.

For all ages over about ten years, we recommend the War-Fighting Manuals (small hardbacks from Gollancz), an interesting series of little handbooks set in a fantasy world where Orcs, Elves and Dwarves are constantly at war and the humans are sort of bystanders. Den Patrick has written 3 very engrossing little books called, Elves War-Fighting Manual, Dwarves War-Fighting Manual, and Orcs War-Fighting Manual. The manuals are from the viewpoint of a human named Sebastian Venghaus, who has extensively researched the three cultures by living with them for an extended period of time.  Each book talks about the weapons, armor, and culture of the race plus you get an idea of how the human is treated when he is a guest. The setting is very interesting, the writing humorous but clean and the books written in such a way that you can open the book to almost any section an enjoy reading from there. As pencil and paper roleplaying gamers since the 1970s, we immediately thought these looked like excellent reference material to run a fantasy adventure campaign, as well as providing some much needed fun reading as an escape from the difficult reading in many of today’s fantasy volumes.

Posted in The Exploding Spaceship, Uncategorized

Friday Quick Updates: Charles Soule, Teen Author Summer Slam, Maggie McNeill, book clubs, the Baen Writers Bootcamp, and more

Posted on 2014-08-15 at 13:37 by montsamu

Friday, August 15, 2014: Like clockwork, once the newsletter goes out, events I missed come to mind or come pouring in. While I've updated the online newsletter with these "NEW-NEW" August events, here they are:

• NEW-NEW: 15 (Friday) 8 pm — Michael D. Acosta’s film Devolve Babylon to show at Geeksboro Cinema in Greensboro. Recently selected into the Eastern North Carolina Film Festival, DVDs are available at: WWW.gogwellfilms.com
• NEW-NEW: 19 (Tuesday) 7 pm — The RTSFS book club discusses John Scalzi’s Redshirts at the B&N at Southpoint. “I’m sure we will be [also] discussing who won the Hugos this weekend. For Sept Half a King by Joe Abercrombie and for October Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey.”
• NEW-NEW: 21 (Thursday) 7 pm — Durham County Southwest Library’s Sub-Genre-O-Rama Book Club discusses Plain Fear: Forsaken by Leanna Ellis, an “Amish-vampire-police procedural romance novel”. More info: http://meetup.com/sub-genre-o-rama
• NEW-NEW: 29 (Friday) 10 pm — Durham author Mur Lafferty will be the guest for “Mr. Diplomat” at DSI Comedy Theater in Chapel Hill. Free. More info: http://www.dsicomedytheater.com/shows/details/mister-diplomat/

Posted in Friday Quick Updates

August Newsletter: Mur Lafferty wins the Manly Wade Wellman Award; events with Charles Soule, Lev Grossman, and John Scalzi; more news and links; and an announcement on the future of Bull Spec

Posted on 2014-08-14 at 13:26 by montsamu

Vol 4. No 8. August 14, 2014: Well, it was bound to happen. In about a year of monthly guest hosting on Carolina Book Beat, I hadn't had a podcast fail. Well, it happened in early July, as guests Wilton Barnhardt and Jeff VanderMeer were really quite fantastic, but if you didn't catch it live, you missed it. Mea culpa.

July was a banner month for events, with Barnhardt, Jay Posey, VanderMeer, Lydia Netzer, Deborah Harkness, D.B. Jackson a.k.a. David B. Coe, and Mur Lafferty all holding events, not to mention new sf convention ConGregate in Winston-Salem with guests of honor Larry Correia and Toni Weisskopf, where Lafferty was awarded the first Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy for her novel The Shambling Guide to New York City. Lafferty writes, "It was a huge honor to win, and an even bigger honor to be the first recipient."At the same awards ceremony, Rich Sigfrit won the Cornerstone Award for his 10+ years of contributions to Carolinas fandom.

Speaking of awards, Natania Barron (for her Pilgrim of the Sky Live video reading series) and Tony Daniel (as host for Baen Free Radio Hour) were nominated for Parsec Awards, along with Bull Spec "alum" Tina Connolly (for her Toasted Cake speculative fiction podcast). Honoring excellence in speculative fiction podcasting, the awards will be presented at Dragon*Con.

Posted in newsletter

Paul Kincaid's From the Other Side, July 2014: Irregularity edited by Jared Shurin, and other happenings and books pre-LonCon

Posted on 2014-08-01 at 17:52 by montsamu

From the Other Side, July 2014

By Paul Kincaid

Most disturbing news of the month came right at the beginning of July when we learned that Terry Pratchett had pulled out of this summer’s International Discworld Convention in Manchester because of what he calls ‘The Embuggerance’. So far his early-onset Alzheimer’s disease has not affected his attendance at events like that, but now, as he says, it ‘is finally catching up with me’. Though he still seems to be keeping up with his writing schedule. In the same announcement he declared that work on the fifth Tiffany Aching book is well under way.

And while we’re on the subject of best selling writers, a tip of the hat to top children’s author Allan Ahlberg, who this month turned down the Booktrust’s inaugural Lifetime Achievement award because it is sponsored by Amazon. He describes Amazon as ‘a baleful influence on the British book trade’ because of its war with Hachette and its blatant tax avoidance in the UK.

On to books, and the title that really caught my eye this month is Irregularity edited by Jared Shurin and published by Jurassic London [Kobo | Kindle | B&N]. It’s another collaboration with the National Maritime Museum tied in with their Longitude season, which I’ve mentioned before. This time we are offered 14 original stories ‘inspired by the great thinkers of the Age of Reason -- those courageous men and women who set out to map, chart, name and classify the world around them. The great minds who brought order and discipline to the universe.’ Except that these stories feature someone or something that refuses to obey the dictates of reason. You’ll get a flavour from the Adam Roberts story that has the irresistible title of ‘The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle’. Other than the title it doesn’t owe much to Ron Hansen’s classic western, but it does include a time-travelling Robert Boyle, the secret of e=mc² hidden in a lost work by Lucretius, and lots of quotes from Queen songs. Other authors in the collection include Nick Harkaway, E.J. Swift, Claire North, James Smythe, and academic Roger Luckhurst making a rare and surprising foray into fiction.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="318"] Irregularity / edited by Jared Shurin / Jurassic London, July 2014[/caption]

Posted in From the Other Side | Tagged british film institute, hannu rajaniemi, irregularity, jared shurin, joe abercrombie, jurassic london, national maritime museum, nine worlds, paul kincaid, rachel pollack

Coming to Town: Deborah Harkness for The Book of Life, interviewed by Sharon Stogner

Posted on 2014-07-22 at 19:08 by montsamu

Deborah Harkness was at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books on Saturday as part of her ongoing tour for The Book of Life, the highly-anticipated final installment of the bestselling All Souls Trilogy which began with A Discovery of Witches.  The sequel Shadow of Night debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and in total, over one million copies have been sold in the States with publications following in 38 countries. While we couldn't have this interview for you prior to her reading and signing, Quail Ridge Books still has signed copies in stock, and for those elsewhere in the country, she still has tour stops in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Houston, Austin, Denver, and Scottsdale, before heading to Canada, Amsterdam, and the United Kingdom.

"The Book of Life picks up right where Shadow of Night left off. After traveling through time, historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont return to the present to continue their hunt for the magical alchemical manuscript, Ashmole 782, otherwise known as the Book of Life. At Matthew’s ancestral home at Sept-Tours, they re­unite with the cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception—ready to face old enemies. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for the Book of Life and its miss­ing pages takes on even more urgency. In the tril­ogy’s final volume, Harkness deepens her themes of power and forbidden passion, family and caring, past deeds and their present consequences. In ancestral homes and university laboratories, using ancient knowl­edge and modern science, from the hills of the Auvergne to the palaces of Venice and beyond, the couple at last learn what the witches discovered so many centuries ago."

Interview by Sharon Stogner

SS: The last book in your All Souls Trilogy, The Book of Life, released July 15. This trilogy had to be an epic undertaking. Are you going to sit back and enjoy some time off or jump right back into another series?

DH: As a matter of fact I’m going to finish up with the book tour and go straight into the classroom for spring semester! I do need a bit of a rest, too, before I commit to another project. All I can say is I have many more stories to tell and look forward to telling them.

SS: What made you want to include a romance in the All Souls Trilogy? Was that aspect harder to write than the other elements of the story?

Posted in Coming to Town | Tagged deborah harkness, quail ridge books, sharon stogner