Open City is narrated by Julius, a young psychiatrist of mixed Nigerian and German heritage. The story begins in 2006 in New York City and is essentially an account of the year that follows in the life of Julius. He wanders the post-9/11 city, at times talking to strangers and at other times keeping to himself, but always sorting through the layers of the city’s history.

This is a novel of the mind, in the modernist tradition of Virginia Woolf and W. G. Sebald. But it also owes something to James Baldwin’s essayistic freedom. Julius is a loner and he is distrustful of causes, and as we follow his life—in addition to New York, he travels briefly to Brussels, and he remembers incidents from his Nigerian childhood—we see that he is also averse to drama. Because of his mixed heritage, he was an outsider while growing up in Nigeria and thought of as white. As an adult in America, he is identified as black. Because he belongs everywhere and nowhere, he takes in the world in an intelligent and detached way.

I was raised in Lagos, Nigeria (both my parents are Nigerian), and am a professional historian of Netherlandish Art, currently working on my dissertation at Columbia University. Not long before I began to write the novel, I worked as a cataloguer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that experience taught me a great deal about curating. Which objects belong with each other? How does one bring together seemingly disparate micro-narratives into a coherent whole? Open City, unlike most novels, is not plot-driven. Rather, it is propelled by the narrative voice, as James Wood pointed out in his laudatory review in The New Yorker.

I hope you will consider Open City for your college-level courses. I believe that it is a challenging but accessible book, formally bold, complex and memorable. The New York Times reviewer Miguel Syjuco wrote that it “does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders,” and called it “a compassionate and masterly work.”

Teju Cole was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992. He is a writer, photographer, and professional historian of early Netherlandish art. Open City is his first novel. He lives in New York City.

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Skloot, who received her MFA in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, is certainly no stranger to structuring stories, and can in fact, become quite obsessed with it.

“My philosophy is,” Skloot tells The OPEN Notebook, “once you understand what structure is, then you can talk about characters and narrative arcs and how to fill in the story. But for me, structure can just completely make or break something.”

To read the full article, including Skloot’s own personal photos of her impressive color-coded index card collection made while organizing the story, click here.

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Random House announces its Eighth Annual Author Luncheon at the 2012 First-Year Experience Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Authors in attendance include:

Sam Bracken, author of My Orange Duffel Bag: A Journey to Radical Change
Peter Buffett, author of Life is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment
Elizabeth Moon, author of The Speed of Dark: A Novel
Blake Mycoskie, author of Start Something That Matters
Darin Strauss, author Half a Life: A Memoir

WHEN: Monday, February 20th, 11:30AM-1:30PM
WHERE: Room #007 on River Level at the Henry B. Gonzalez
Convention Center, 200 E. Market Street, San Antonio, TX
WHY: To hear five authors speak about their books

Join us for FREE books and FREE lunch!

RSVP soon, email: rhacademic@randomhouse.com. Space is limited!

THE THIRD WAVE by Alison Thompson

Alison Thompson, author of The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), recalls her experiences as a volunteer; experiences she believes will both inspire and challenge students to pursue their own journeys of service and action:

September 11th, 2011, marked the ten year anniversary of my journey around the world as a volunteer. On that day in 2001, when all I knew was that a tower had collapsed and that my good friend had been in it, I strapped on my rollerblades, packed up my first aid kit, and headed downtown to see what I could do to help. I ended up staying at Ground Zero for nine months, sifting through the rubble, collecting bodies, and tending to the firemen and ironworkers. Since then, I’ve made it my life’s mission to be on the ground whenever a major disaster strikes. I spent fourteen months in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami, and I currently work as a full-time volunteer in Haiti, where I moved right after the 2010 earthquake.

I wrote The Third Wave in order to provide a glimpse of what it’s really like on the ground after a disaster. I wanted show readers that

anyone can help, that small acts of kindness can create great change in the world. Although my experience as a nurse’s aid has come in handy, much of the work I do on a daily basis can be done by anyone. You don’t need specialized skills to make a difference; everyone can hand out water or give someone a hug. At our clinic in Haiti, I recently met a shy girl who had a runny nose and scabies eating away at her head. She asked me for water. I poured a tiny medical cup full of it, and she leaned back with a smile, slowly letting it slide into her mouth like chocolate. I realized that it was probably the first time she had ever tasted pure water. I felt humbled as I poured her another cup, and then another. I gave her mother a few sanitary pads, a bar of soap, and a can of milk, and she cried at the wonderful presents. That is why I volunteer.

Another reason I wrote The Third Wave was to show that you don’t need to belong to an organization in order to have an effect. When I first went to Sri Lanka after the Tsunami of 2004, I connected with a ragtag group of other volunteers, and together we rebuilt a village that wasn’t on any of the large NGOs’ radars. Today’s natural and man-made disasters are growing too large for governments and aid groups to handle them alone. We are all needed. Every college student has the skills to help, whether it’s for an hour in one’s own community, for a week over spring break, or throughout the semester.

I believe that college students today are looking for more than a classroom education; they expect to grow as individuals throughout their four years at college, to figure out what their place is in the world and what they can do to make it a better place. My hope is that The Third Wave will inspire students to think more broadly about their own potential and challenge them to take action.

Why did I write about Montaigne? Mostly because I wanted to keep on reading him.

Ever since my early 20s, when I picked up his Essays by chance, wanting a good book for a long train journey, he never really left me. My first response to his work on that train was one of astonishment. How could someone who wrote in the 1500s sound so familiar, so conversational, so like me? It was like having a friend or a traveling companion sitting opposite me as we whizzed through the landscape. For years after that, Montaigne was never far from my side. And I discovered that practically everything else I read had the power of leading me back to him in some way—for Montaigne is the first truly modern author, the great hidden presence behind 400 years of literature, and indeed behind much of philosophy, politics, and social theory over those centuries.

This is mainly for one simple reason: No one before Montaigne had written so honestly and minutely about the inner world of a human being.

He followed every twist and turn of his psyche, believing that every individual is worth writing about at such length, for “each man bears the entire form of the human condition.” But he also paid plenty of attention to the world outside. He was interested in everything; he traveled widely, held offices as magistrate and mayor, ran diplomatic missions for kings and princes, and tried his best to end the religious civil wars that tore apart the France of his day. These experiences led him to a deep fascination with human variety and difference. We share our essential humanity, he knew, but each of us has a radically different cultural, historical, and personal perspective, and that is just as fundamental.

Human variety is the great paradox in his work; it’s also the great paradox facing us today. How can a plural, democratic society accommodate difference, and even extremism, without sacrificing its deepest principles? How can we resist violence without becoming violent? How can we defend ourselves yet remain open? Montaigne gave us no simple answers, but he certainly taught us to ask the questions.

I set out to write about Montaigne’s life, but I ended up wanting to write about much more—and especially about the experience of reading itself, that is, the experience of encountering a mind distant in time that opens itself to us, perhaps not entirely, but in part. What does it mean to pick up a book published in 1588 and recognize ourselves and our world in it? How can we engage critically with such a book and understand it on its own terms while also making it our own? What can be learned from someone who died more than 400 years ago? Why is the past so strange and so familiar at the same time? To ask these questions is to investigate the very essence of what culture is—and it is why reading a book is such an exciting thing to do.

Many people will ask these questions for the first time in their college years, and I envy your students this; it will happen while they are with you. Others experience it earlier, and some, later.  Whenever it happens, it changes you. Afterward, the habit of questioning gets into your soul—and then the whole world opens up.

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“Thank you for sending me a copy of Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

We may be able to use the book here at Purdue University in our upper division undergraduate class on the psychology of personality. Perhaps we can have the students read it before they read the textbook.

Several aspects of Susan Cain’s book are remarkable. First, it is well informed by research. That being said, it uses the research literature but is not held captive by it. She offers a big picture analysis, as seen from a molar, ‘cultural point of view.’ Second, it is exceptionally well written, and ‘reader friendly.’ It will appeal to a wide range of readers. Third, it is insightful. I am sure many people wonder why brash, impulsive behavior seems to be rewarded, whereas reflective, thoughtful behavior is overlooked.

This book goes beyond such superficial impressions to a more penetrating analysis (as befits the book’s general orientation). As the author herself concedes, some of the behaviors she describes may be connected to personality characteristics other than extroversion, but given the book’s larger goals, that is acceptable. As a researcher who has published empirical papers on extraversion, self-monitoring, agreeableness, and Person-Thing Orientation, I can see differences among them, but all of them deal with a larger issue of social accommodation. My impression is that Susan Cain may be more interested in the dynamics of social accommodation than with the single predictor of introversion, per se.

I think you (and Susan Cain) have a winner here.”

—William Graziano, Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University

Also just in, a fantastic appraisal from Dr. Brian Little, distinguished scholar at Cambridge University:

Susan Cain’s Quiet is superb. Based on meticulous research, it is a compelling reflection on how the Extrovert ideal shapes our lives and why this is deeply unsettling.  Drawing on the latest research, and reflecting a deep personal passion for her topic, Cain has written an elegant and powerful plea for introversion.  It will open up a new and different conversation on how the personal is political and how we need to empower the legions of people who are disposed to be quiet, reflective and sensitive. Quiet  deserves to be widely read, heeded and passed along to our friends, family, colleagues and, perhaps most of all, to that loud, blunt and  sometimes boorish extrovert down the hall.

— Brian R. Little, Ph.D., Disinguished Scholar, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Cambridge University

And the praises just keeping coming in! Read what other academics are saying about Quiet:

“Finally someone has exposed the feet of clay of the extraversion industry. It is a wonder it took so long. Those who value a quiet, reflective life will feel a burden lifting from their shoulders as they read Susan Cain’s eloquent and well documented paean to introversion—and will no longer feel guilty or inferior for having made the better choice!” —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University; author of Flow

“Quiet is a book of liberation from old ideas about the value of introverts. The book tells tales of psychological discovery that are just as fascinating as the stories of introverts whose ideas and actions have changed history. Cain’s intelligence, respect for research, and vibrant prose put Quiet in an elite class with the best books from Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, and other masters of psychological non-fiction.” —Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor; coauthor, The Progress Principle

“Gentle is powerful. . . . Solitude is socially productive. . . . These important counter-intuitive ideas are among the many reasons to take Quiet to a quiet corner and absorb its brilliant, thought-provoking message.”
—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor; author of Confidence and SuperCorp

“What Susan Cain understands—and readers of this fascinating volume will soon appreciate—is something that psychology and our fast moving—and talking—society has been all too slow to realize: Not only is there really nothing wrong with being quiet, reflective, shy and introverted, but  there are distinct advantages to being this way. Perhaps like those more quiet individuals whom this book heralds, many of us would benefit if we lived according to the old adage about crossing the street: stop, look and listen.” —Jay Belsky, Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor, Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis

“Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that gives us startling new insights. Quiet is that book: it will change the way you see yourself, other people, and the world. It’s part page-turner, part cutting-edge science. The implications for business are especially valuable: Quiet offers tips on how introverts can lead effectively, give winning speeches, avoid burnout, and choose the right roles. This charming, gracefully written, thoroughly researched book is simply masterful.” —Adam M. Grant, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Management, The Wharton School

Check out our previous post to read the author’s personal message to her readers, introverts and extroverts alike: A Message for Empowering Introverts.

To get your free advanced reader’s copy of Quiet, either leave a message for us here in the comment section or email us at rhacademic@randomhouse.com with your preferred shipping information.

I first thought about the powers and challenges of introversion some 26 years ago, when I began my freshman year at Princeton University.

From the minute I set foot on campus, I saw that college could be an extraordinary place for introverts and extroverts alike. A place where you were expected to spend your time reading and writing. A place where it was cool to talk about ideas. A place where there were so many people, each doing his or her own thing, that you could create your own brand of social life. If you were an introvert, you could find friends with common interests and enjoy their company one-on-one or in small groups; if you were an extrovert, the social possibilities were endless, just the way extroverts like them.

I was an introvert, and I thrived.
Not that it was always easy. At Princeton, as on many campuses, many social and academic structures seemed designed for extroverts. I wondered why the cafeteria was arranged so that the large circular tables, where the most gregarious students sat, were located near the sunny windows, while the booths for quieter chats were off in the shadowy margins of the room. I wondered whether any of my classmates longed to munch on a tuna sandwich behind a newspaper as I did, instead of being expected to participate in a social free-for-all three times a day. I learned to praise Princeton’s excellent seminars, and to participate in them, but privately I preferred lectures where you could soak up knowledge and think your own thoughts instead of having to perform them out loud.

Most of all, I wondered whether I was the only one who felt this way.

Today, after interviewing hundreds of current and former college students, I know the answer:  I wasn’t the only one. Not by a long shot.

Did you know that one third to one half of the population is introverted? That’s one out of every two or three students on campus. But most schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are organized with extroverts in mind—even though many of the achievements that have propelled society, from the theory of evolution to the invention of the PC, from van Gogh’s sunflowers to The Cat in the Hat, came from people who were quiet, cerebral, and sensitive.  Even in less obviously introverted occupations, like finance, politics, and activism, some of the greatest leaps forward were made by introverts: Eleanor Roosevelt. Al Gore. Warren Buffett. Gandhi.

This is no coincidence. There are specific physiological and psychological advantages to being an introvert and I’ll share them with your students through the lens of my book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I’ll tell your students how we can all learn from the introverts among us, including how to be more creative, think more carefully, love more gently, and organize our schools and workplaces more productively. Quiet also challenges contemporary myths of human nature, including the belief that creativity is fundamentally collaborative, and our preference for charismatic leaders.

But Quiet offers insights and advice for extroverts too, and it gives all students the license to talk about a social dynamic they’ve been living and breathing but never given voice to. Introversion/extroversion is as fundamental a difference between people as gender, yet until now we’ve lacked the vocabulary— and the cultural permission—to talk about it.

I’ve never presented the ideas in Quiet without getting people buzzing about whether they and their friends are introverts or extroverts, and what that means for their relationships, career choices, and life paths. Quiet is sure to spark animated discussions across campus, from the psychology and social-science classroom to the dorm room and dining hall.

I’ll be conducting an international speaking tour this year, and I look forward to continuing these discussions around campuses nationwide, as part of your Freshman Experience Programs. I invite you to contact me through my blog, ThePowerOfIntroverts.com, to discuss opportunities.

Quiet will prepare your students for careers working alongside introverted and extroverted colleagues, bosses, and employees. And it will help them to understand the people they care about most: their classmates, their family, their partners, their children— and themselves.

Susan Cain
www.ThePowerOfIntroverts.com

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“So I was ready to be irritated by ‘Start Something That Matters,’ and the book does include a fair amount of gushy do-goodism. By the end, though, I was sold. Mr. Mycoskie tells a convincing and lively story.”

To read the full article in the WSJ, click here.

In Start Something That Matters, Mycoskie tells the story of TOMS, short for “Tomorrow’s Shoes,” one of the fastest-growing shoe companies in the world, and combines it with lessons learned from such other innovative organizations as method, charity: water, FEED Projects, and TerraCycle.

Mycoskie presents the six simple keys for creating or transforming your own life and business, from discovering your core story to being resourceful without resources; from overcoming fear and doubt to incorporating giving into every aspect of your life. No matter what kind of change you’re considering, Start Something That Matters gives readers the stories, ideas, and practical tips that can help them get started.

We just received two brand new finished copies of Start Something That Matters hot off the press. Be the first to leave us a comment here letting us know what matters to you, or why this title might pertain to your classroom in particular, and you could receive a free copy!

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In his book, Wes sets out to answer a profound question of how the influence of just a select few individuals can alter the path of an entire life. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world. It has been adopted as common reading text in over a dozen universities and schools across the country.

Be sure to check out “The New Greatest Generation” issue of TIME Magazine on stands this week. Catch up on how young war veterans like Wes are redefining leadership.

Want to check out what happened behind the scenes of the cover shoot? Click here to watch the video!

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The book isn’t officially on sale until January 2012, but the title has already created quite a lot of buzz. Cain’s incredibly insightful article, “Is Shyness an Evolutionary Tactic?” was featured as one of the most emailed articles in The New York Times Opinion Pages this past weekend.

Cain makes the point that the personality traits of introversion and shyness (two very different things, as she makes clear) are largely undervalued and negatively judged in today’s highly extrovert society.  Yet there are a surprising number of valuable assets that come with these “quieter” traits. Reading Quiet will hopefully bring us all much cause for reflection and leave us with a new outlook on embracing all personality types, quiet or loud.

Susan Cain, a self-proclaimed introvert, is a consultant to major corporations and law firms on negotiation strategies and personal presentation style. Not to shabby. Visit her website at: ThePowerofIntroverts.com.

To get your free advanced reader’s copy of Quiet, either leave a message for us here in the comment section or email us at rhacademic@randomhouse.com with your preferred shipping information.