March 1, 2012

Philadelphia U Selects Start Something That Matters for FYE Pick!

We’re happy to share that Philadelphia University has selected Blake Mycoskie’s Start Something That Matters as their text for the 2012 First Year Experience Summer Reading Program! The university’s focus on entrepreneurship and innovation, and its drive to educate civically engaged leaders make this text an important message: that students’ passions and careers are not mutually exclusive, but in fact should be intimately connected. Read more on PhilaU Today’s article about how they selected this title and why the book’s message is of great importance to students today.

In Start Something That Matters, Blake Mycoskie tells the story of TOMS, 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. Blake 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.

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February 16, 2012

A Message from the Author of The Night Wanderers

Wojciech Jagielski, author of The Night Wanderers, discusses his new book on the story of child solderies of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda in hopes of it serving as a warning against indifference:

My book started with my years’ long fascination with Uganda, one that made me visit Uganda on several occasions and to think a lot about its recent history. The reign of Idi Amin and then the bloody civil wars destroying the country afterwards became, in my mind, the symbol of the “Heart of Darkness” of our time, where one can observe, or maybe even understand, the essence of evil that under certain circumstances becomes a part of human nature.

Initially, my idea was to tell the story of the child soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a macabre rebel group commanded by Joseph Kony, a person who, by his own description, was possessed by ghosts. Continue reading →

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January 17, 2012

A Message from Author Teju Cole

Teju Cole discusses his novel Open City (now in paperback) and its potential for use in  college common reading programs:

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 Continue reading →

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November 29, 2011

How Rebecca Skloot Built The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has been interviewed a multitude of times on the story behind the book, but The OPEN Notebook chose instead to focus on these two interesting topics: the structure of the story, and Skloot’s decision to put herself in the book.

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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November 7, 2011

Mark your calendars for the Eighth Annual Random House First-Year Experience Author Luncheon!

      

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!

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October 18, 2011

A Volunteer’s Story to Inspire & Challenge Students

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

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September 23, 2011

Teaching Students How to Live

Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live, has a message to share with her readers on why she chose to write Montaigne’s new biography:

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.

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