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Published on April 04, 2017 10:33

Get Out of the Car With Your Hands Up

This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 4 April 2017 | 3:00 pm.
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You’re driving to your favorite city when you’re stopped by a police officer. Sure, you were going a few miles over the speed limit, so you’re not overly surprised. But you are surprised when the police officer gets to your car and screams, “Get out of your car with your hands up!” This leads to a unexpected night for you. Write this scene.

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

Stories of Wonder, Fear and Kindness From the Moth

This content was originally published by MICHIKO KAKUTANI on 3 April 2017 | 9:57 pm.
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Dori Samadzai Bonner recounts how her family made its way out of war-torn Afghanistan in the early 1990s with forged papers, and how her father — who had been tortured there and feared for his life — had to beg an American judge for asylum in the United States.

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Catherine Burns, the Moth’s artistic director.

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Aly Nicklas

Louis C. K. describes a visit he made to Russia in 1994 because he was burned out and lonely, and “because when I was a kid, I used to read Russian novels, and I loved them.” (“I would open all the windows so I would be cold. I wanted to be cold like they were.”) He realized, after a miserable, surreal trip, that he’d gone there “to find out how bad life gets” and how funny it still is.

Hasan Minhaj recalls developing a crush in high school on a pretty girl named Bethany, who asked him to go to the prom with her — his American dream come true! Only when he arrived at her house, he saw the captain of the water polo team putting a corsage on her. Bethany’s mother explained that since they would be taking a lot of photos, they didn’t think that he would be “a good fit.” In other words, Hasan — who is the son of an immigrant from a small town in India — thinks that the “prom wasn’t an event for people that look like me.”

The stories here, for the most part, have translated seamlessly to the page. Though they are all relatively short — average Moth performances range from five minutes to 12 minutes — most possess a remarkable emotional depth and sincerity. The stories vary greatly in tone and voice — by turns, raw, wry, rueful, comic, elliptical and confiding — but there is little sarcasm or snark. The emphasis is on communicating with the audience, with sharing an experience, a memory, a moment of grace.

Moth stories can be seen as part of the oral tradition dating back to Homer, but the personal nature of the tales — and their air of spontaneity — owe as much to stand-up comedy, blogging, talk-show anecdotes and group therapy. They are not random reminiscences, however, but closely focused, finely tuned narratives that have the force of an epiphany, while opening out to disclose the panoramic vistas of one person’s life or the shockingly disparate worlds they have inhabited or traversed.

In “Unusual Normality,” Ishmael Beah — who lost his family to war in Sierra Leone and became a child soldier at age 13 — relates how he was adopted by an American woman when he was 17, and how he attempted to fit in at school in New York. For instance, he did not tell his new classmates why he was so adept at paintball: “I wanted to explain certain things, but I felt that if they knew about my background, they would no longer allow me to be a child. They would see me as an adult, and I worried that they would fear me.

“My silence allowed me to experience things, to participate in my childhood, to do things I hadn’t been able to do as a child.”

Other stories pivot around a relationship between two people: the scientist Christof Koch and his longtime collaborator Francis Crick (who together with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA); Stephanie Peirolo and her son RJ, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after his car was struck at a blind intersection; the actor John Turturro and his troubled brother Ralph, who lives at the Creedmore Psychiatric Center in Queens; Suzi Ronson, a hairdresser from a London suburb, who cut the young David Bowie’s hair, joined his tour and went on to become a music producer; the filmmaker Arthur Bradford and his friend Ronnie Simonsen, who has cerebral palsy and who became obsessed with meeting the actor Chad Everett, who played a doctor on the old TV show “Medical Center.”

One of the most moving tales is “Fog of Disbelief,” by Carl Pillitteri, who was working as a field engineer on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station in Japan when a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the island in 2011, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl; it left some 18,490 people dead or missing and led to the evacuation of more than 300,000.

After checking on his crew and colleagues, Pillitteri was most concerned about the older woman who ran the restaurant where he ate five, six times a week. He spoke no Japanese, she spoke no English, and he and his friends knew her, fondly, only as the “Chicken Lady.” The little building housing her restaurant was badly cracked by the quake, and she was nowhere to be found — even months later, when Pillitteri returned to the exclusion zone from America to look for her. Eventually, he enlisted the help of The Japan Times in tracking her down, and learned that her name was Mrs. Owada; the name of her restaurant, Ikoi, meant “rest, relax, and relief.”

Finally, almost a year after the quake, he received a letter from her: “I have escaped from the disasters and have been doing fine every day. Pillitteri-san, please take care of yourself. I know your work must be important. I hope you enjoy a happy life like you seemed to have when you came to my restaurant. Although I won’t be seeing you, I will always pray for the best for you.”

The post Stories of Wonder, Fear and Kindness From the Moth appeared first on Art of Conversation.

[4 Ways to Create Believable Urban Fantasy]

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Published on April 04, 2017 01:19

April 3, 2017

Remembering Richard Nelson Bolles, Self-Pub Pioneer

This content was originally published by Jessica Strawser on 3 April 2017 | 7:10 pm.
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BY JESSICA STRAWSER

Richard Nelson Bolles was one of the earliest examples of indie-author success. Before his hit book What Color is Your Parachute? spent a whopping 288 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, Bolles distributed photocopies of the book by hand to friends and family. With the passing of 90-year-old Bolles last Friday, March 31, 2017, we remember him through this profile from the May 2002 Writer’s Digest.

For Richard Nelson Bolles, losing his job turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. When he was laid off from his position as an ordained Episcopal minister in 1968, he had no idea that the coming years would yield a bestselling book on finding a job. And it all began with a few innocent photocopies of a book he called What Color Is Your Parachute?

When he lost his position at a San Francisco cathedral, Bolles went on to land a job with United Ministries in Higher Education. He was to oversee campus ministers of all denominations in nine Western states. Much to his horror, one by one these ministers began to lose their jobs as well. They turned to him for guidance. He simply replied that he would research their options.

Already traveling around the country to fulfill his job duties, Bolles stayed an extra day in each location to interview career counselors and other professionals about their advice to unemployed ministers. The questions he asked more than 30 years ago still haunt many job seekers to this day.

Once he had compiled enough useful ideas, Bolles sat down and typed them. On Dec. 1, 1970, he photocopied what he had written, titled it What Color Is Your Parachute? and distributed copies to the ministers who had sought his help, charging only the cost of crudely assembling the book. He thought his work was done. It was just beginning.

Almost magically, Bolles began receiving orders for more copies. “[People would] see it on somebody’s desk. It had a rather bright salmon-colored cover, and it was 8.5 × 11. It was hard to miss,” Bolles says. “I just wrote it for the campus ministers, and when I got an order from anybody else I was very surprised.” He began selling the book for $6.95, making about a dollar on each sale.

Bolles made no marketing attempts. But, inexplicably, orders were escalating. “I started to notice something very peculiar, which was, although this was very obviously a book written just for one target audience—namely campus ministers—the people that started ordering [the book] baffled me. I started getting orders from the Pentagon, from General Electric, from UCLA …”  he says.

Bolles decided to visit a few of his surprise customers to investigate. He asked them why they were buying his book, and found that they were modifying his ideas for their own job searches. He sold 2,000 copies of the book that first year.

By 1972, Bolles says it was obvious he couldn’t keep up with the demand. Again, without any promotional attempts, he received a letter from Phil Wood, the owner of Ten Speed Press, who had happened upon a copy of the book and wanted to publish it commercially.

Bolles revised the book for a more general audience, and Ten Speed released it in November 1972. “For a year or so it just dilly-dallied, and then all of a sudden it took off like a rocket,” he says. Within two years, it was the No. 1 paperback best seller in the Northwest.

The book started appearing on notable lists across the country as well, including those by Publishers Weekly and The New York Times. In its history, What Color Is Your Parachute? has spent 288 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, being bumped from the list only when the advice category was changed to list only the top five books, rather than 10.

It has regularly sold at least 20,000 copies a month for the past 25 years. “It just turned into a phenomenon. I don’t know why! People love my irreverent sense of humor, and there is nothing I won’t make fun of.” In 1995, the Library of Congress even listed it as one of the top 25 books that have shaped people’s lives.

“When I handed [my book] to [Phil], I said, ‘My instinct just tells me this is going to be a bestseller,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what every author says,’” Bolles recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘If it is, I want to revise it every year.” And, since 1974, Bolles has been doing just that, making it his mission to keep the book as up-to-date as he can.

Over the years, he says revising the book has become easier and more fun. “You don’t have to spend a lot of time researching anymore when a book gets to be this popular.” Readers write to Bolles with their ideas and tips, and he adds them. “I’m sort of a switchboard now for a whole community of people who share with me their job hunting ideas. In other words, the research comes to me.”

The 2002 edition of What Color Is Your Parachute? is the most major revision since the original. Rather than revising about 20 percent of the content, as usual, Bolles decided to rewrite the entire book. “I thought, you know, the only way you can stay fresh is if you challenge yourself.”

He decided to ask himself, “What if I were just starting out today? How would I write this book?” He asked his friends to make him lists of their favorite parts of the book, and he made sure not to omit those sections. The rewrite took him about three and a half months, says Bolles, who has also published six other books with Ten Speed and is working on a new book about faith.

As to why What Color Is Your Parachute? reached so many people the way it did, Bolles has been asking his readers that question for 30 years. His conclusion? “People tend to pick [the book] up when they’re at some point in their [lives] when they’ve put a lot of energy into trying to fix the things they want to fix about their [lives], particularly in the work world, and they’re just at this stopping point. And the book, when they read it, gets them going and the rest is all that energy they’ve been investing for months or years.”

The different ways his book has managed to impact so many lives, beyond the job hunting tips, are probably more than Bolles will ever know. But his readers have taught him that his book relates more to his original mission in life than he might have guessed.

As he says, “It’s a book of hope masquerading as a job hunting manual.”

Jessica Strawser is the editorial director of Writer’s Digest, and author of the novel Almost Missed You. This article originally appeared in the May 2002 Writer’s Digest.

5 Elements All Urban Fantasy Novels Must Have

This content was originally published by Guest Column on 3 April 2017 | 8:30 pm.
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Even if you don’t regularly haunt the science fiction and fantasy section of your local bookstore, chances are you’ve crossed paths with the vibrant, ever-popular subgenre of urban fantasy. Not only is there frequently an urban fantasy or two on the New York Times bestseller list, but it’s one of the most common types of fantasy to make its way to the big and small screen. How do you recognize a good urban fantasy when you see one, and if you want to try your hand at writing one, what’s the basic recipe?

This guest post is by Mishell Baker. Baker, author of Borderline, is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Redstoe Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede. She has a website at mishellbaker.com and frequently tweets about writing, parenthood, mental health and assorted geekery at @mishellbaker. When she’s not attending conventions or wild research adventures, she lives with her husband and children in Los Angeles.

1. The City

The “urban” in urban fantasy means that the setting should always be one of the main characters. While books with a UF “flavor” have been set in rural areas, historical periods, small towns, or even secondary worlds, the classic urban fantasy setting is a dense, highly populated present-day metropolis. Think London, New York, or San Francisco–the sophisticated pulse and personality of the city permeates the story. Readers will expect to become as familiar with the rules of public transport, commerce, law enforcement, and local weather as they are with the laws of the supernatural, so if you don’t live in the city you’re writing about, wear out a good, in-depth travel guide or two, speak to locals, and visit if you can.

2. The Magic

The “fantasy” part means that somewhere, running through the veins of that sophisticated city, is something wild and strange. “Paranormal” elements like ghosts, werewolves, zombies and vampires certainly count, but if you really want to hit the urban fantasy sweet spot, at some point you’ll want to have a character cast a spell or perform a ritual. Part of the fun of urban fantasy is figuring out the interplay of magic and technology, and these rules differ from universe to universe. Can fairies ride the subway? Do vampires work night shifts at hospitals? Are computers and magic mutually hostile, or is there a whole branch of magic that depends on good wifi?

3. The Mystery

Fans of UF love a good whodunit, and for this reason, many of the most successful urban fantasies prominently feature law enforcement, private detectives, crime scenes and life-or-death suspense. But there’s lots of room to define what a “mystery” might be, especially in a world that incorporates laws beyond the ordinary. The most necessary element to consider in the plot of an urban fantasy is the unanswered question. It’s usually not enough in an urban fantasy for your protagonist to have a strong driving goal; there should also be a huge, possibly frightening unknown that gradually unfolds throughout the story, thanks to clever and persistent investigation.

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4. The Point of View

There’s a reason that first-person point of view is so popular in urban fantasy, and it isn’t just the genre’s cozy relationship with noir. One of the traditions of urban fantasy is that it is intensely character-driven: profoundly affected or even warped by the opinions of the protagonist. As with its cousin the mystery series, in urban fantasy it is often the personality of the protagonist–the investigator, the misfit, the fearless confronter of the uncanny–that keeps readers coming back for sequel after sequel. Even if you don’t plan to write a series featuring the same character throughout, great attention should be paid to your main characters “voice” and mindset. Is she at home in a pack of werewolves but lost at the corner of 5th and Main? Is he irritated and unnerved by the supernatural elements that are taking over the city he grew up in? Make sure you know the lens your reader is looking through in your story, and how it shapes or obscures the view.

5. The Sizzle

Last but not least, urban fantasy is sexy. Even if you don’t have an all-out love scene or fully-developed romantic relationship in your story, if you’re going for classic urban fantasy then you’ll want to make sure that sex simmers somewhere in the background. A lingering gaze, a billowing coat, a bit of bare leg—these things can go a long way toward creating a sensual atmosphere that keeps every page electric and exciting even when there’s not a crime scene to investigate. Urban fantasy readers want to be thrilled, and blatant or subtle eroticism is great way to keep a reader’s heart rate high. Just be sure that there’s a plot outside of and dominant to any developing relationship, or you’ve found your way into paranormal romance, which is another subgenre altogether!

Now, of course there are successful urban fantasies that play havoc with these “Must-have” elements and forge entirely new territory. But if you’re new to the genre and looking to get a feel for it, this checklist will keep you on track and make sure that agents, editors and readers recognize what you’re after. Like the fearless mavericks that so often drive urban fantasy stories, you’ve got to know the rules before you can break them.

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Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.

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PW Talks with Reggie Nadelson

This content was originally published by on 3 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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In 1997, New York’s SoHo, then decidedly more low-key and artsy, was shaken up by the arrival of the upscale, bustling brasserie, Balthazar. Soon, celebrities started flocking to the mirror-and-banquette-filled hangout for croissants and plateaux de fruits de mer. They joined early devotees like writer Reggie Nadelson, whose At Balthazar: The New York Brasserie at the Center of the World (Gallery Books, April 4), will publish to coincide with the restaurant's 20th anniversary. It's a deep, unrestricted dive into the restaurant’s persistent allure.

We chatted with Nadelson about Balthazar's consistency in a shifting SoHo.

How did the project first start brewing?

It took about ten years of nagging. I went to Balthazar for breakfast a lot and one day in 2003, right after I wrote a piece for a magazine, Keith [McNally, the restaurant’s owner] told me he wished I had written the intro to the Balthazar cookbook. Instead, I begged him to let me do this book. He was reluctant. Finally, in 2014 he said okay. I grew up in Greenwich Village and have always lived in restaurants. I love the culture.

At Balthazar is a hybrid of recipes and a glimpse into one of New York’s most well-known restaurants, and to fully tell that story you travel to places like Kansas and Bordeaux, capturing the importance of Balthazar’s relationship with different purveyors. What did you want to illuminate by collecting all these different snapshots?

Keith says that restaurants have a social function, and that’s true whether it’s a brasserie, diner, or pub. After 9/11, Balthazar opened early and it was a place where people came together. A lot of the staff has worked there for twenty years. No one ever seems to leave, and if they do, they come back. I never used a tape recorder more than when talking to the chefs, dishwashers, and waiters. They come from forty different countries like Pakistan, Senegal, and the Dominican Republic, and they all manage to get along, which is an affirmation of one’s feelings about New York. I wanted to show how Balthazar is truly a microcosm of the city.

How do you think SoHo was transformed by Balthazar’s opening?

New Yorkers always complain and say SoHo was better when it had interesting shops and galleries and wasn’t yet a mall. Balthazar gave SoHo a center, but a lot of writers and artists went there, so it felt like a real neighborhood spot where we got to be friends with the regulars and waiters. Sometimes we would stay for breakfast until three p.m. It was idyllic and it very much defined SoHo as a destination. There were tourists in those days, but only those with a little bit of daring.

Your year and a half of research and writing must have led to many eye-opening moments. What is one of your favorite discoveries?

How much extraordinary effort it takes to run a restaurant. Consistency is everything, and Balthazar turns out half a million meals a year of the same quality. A perfect steak frites always needs to be a perfect steak frites. There’s one guy in a small kitchen, and he’s been peeling potatoes for twenty years. It’s not a machine. The people at Balthazar aren’t working mechanically; they really care.

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Published on April 03, 2017 17:08

‘My determination outweighs my fear every day,’ Boston Marathon bombing survivor says with new book

This content was originally published by Dialynn Dwyer on 3 April 2017 | 7:30 pm.
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Boston Marathon bombing survivor Rebekah Gregory is celebrating a new milestone this week: becoming an author.

Gregory, 29, was watching the marathon in 2013 with her then-5-year-old son, Noah, when the blast went off and ultimately had to have her left leg amputated. Her book about her experience, Taking My Life Back, will be released Tuesday.

In an appearance on the Today show Monday, Gregory said she feels blessed as she starts the new chapter in her life.

“My determination outweighs my fear every day,” she said. “So just because I was at the Boston Marathon and I got blown up does not mean my life stops there. I was three feet from a bomb and I’m here today, so I am very blessed, regardless of anything else that happens.”

“Just because I was at the Boston Marathon & got blown up, does not mean that my life stops there.” @rebekahmgregory tells @savannahguthrie pic.twitter.com/lw7y0AU9di

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 3, 2017

She told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie she thinks there’s a misconception that because the bombing occurred four years ago, she and other survivors have “moved on” with their lives.

“What people don’t understand is the emotional impact of everything is so much greater than the physical,” she said. “So what we saw that day — people’s body parts were on the ground next to us, bones were lying on the sidewalk, blood, nails, bbs, ball bearings, and so that sticks with you.”

In a separate interview with Kathie Lee Gifford and Jenna Bush Hager, she said she detailed her struggles and put “everything in the book” with the hope that she may be able to help others by sharing her own experience.

Still, reliving her experience while writing the book was a challenge, she said.

“It was tough,” she said. “It’s been one of the toughest things I’ve ever done, but it was healing too. There was a lot of chapters and a lot of memories that I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. So just to put them down on paper, really, it felt good.”

Gregory, who said at age 10 that she wanted to write a book before she turned 30, celebrated her new title of “author” on Facebook over the weekend, writing: “that sounds so much better than bombing victim don’t you think?!”

Monday morning, she took a moment to reflect on the new phase of her life with the achievement of her “biggest dream” of writing a book:

“‘Taking My Life Back’ is not just my story on paper,” she wrote. “It is my testament that no matter what obstacles may come, my determination will never falter. It is also a reminder that the courage inside us all, is greater than any fear we could ever conjure.”

Watch Gregory’s interviews on the Today show here and here.

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Published on April 03, 2017 16:08

A Memoir of Motherhood Lost

This content was originally published by LESLIE JAMISON on 3 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Credit

Édith Carron

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY
A Memoir
By Ariel Levy
207 pp. Random House. $27.

In November 2013, Ariel Levy published an essay in The New Yorker that quickly went viral: “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” is a beautifully crafted, harrowing account of giving birth to a baby after 19 weeks of pregnancy, a baby who lived for only a few minutes. I had already admired Levy for years — as a journalist, and a chronicler of human life in its oddity and yearning — and the essay lodged inside me in the way that truly moving writing burrows into your sense of the world and takes up residence for good.

For all my admiration, though, I never once hoped her essay would become a book. It was such a perfect essay. Why would it need to become anything else?

Levy’s new memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” is much more than just an extension of that essay. It’s an account of a marriage and its dissolution, a female writer’s coming-of-age, a woman reckoning with the various cultural scripts that have been written for her gender. But the emotional core of this book is undeniably that loss, and its strongest writing still revolves around it, as if compelled by its unrelenting gravity. Of her son, she writes: “I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun.”

Turning from the essay to the book is an education in the messiness of grief. No story is as simple as its streamlined version in the pages of a magazine, and though there was little that felt traditionally slick or elided in Levy’s essay — it was skillfully and purposefully unvarnished — her memoir opens its camera aperture to show more of the complicated before-and-after around its epicenter: infidelity, alcoholism, ambivalence and estrangement. There’s a deep generosity in Levy’s willingness to acknowledge that trauma is rarely dignified or simple; her writing offers readers a salve against the loneliness of feeling that one’s own sorrow should feel more elegant or pure.

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Whenever I teach Levy’s essay, and I teach it frequently, my students often praise it for being “unsentimental.” I know what they mean, that it doesn’t seem to be asking for sympathy, or resolving difficult experience into an easily digested moral, but what I admire about that essay, and what I admire about the strongest passages of this book, is Levy’s refusal to evade emotion. She risks the full tilt of feeling. “Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled,” she writes, and she gives us the song of that vulnerable land. She renders overwhelming sorrow with precise brush strokes and eerie constellations of details: a cellphone photo, a Snickers bar, the smoggy Mongolian sky.

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Published on April 03, 2017 15:06

Wild Rumpus Named 2017 PW Bookstore of the Year; DeCourcey Rep

This content was originally published by on 3 April 2017 | 4:00 am.

For the first time since the PW awards were launched nearly 25 years ago, a children’s bookstore has been named winner by a panel of industry judges. Wild Rumpus Books in Minneapolis, Minn., which is celebrating its first quarter century in 2017, is this year’s PW Bookstore of the Year.

The bookstore, which was founded by Collette Morgan and Tom Braun, takes its name from Maurice Sendak’s oft-quoted line in Where the Wild Things Are: “Let the wild rumpus start!” Books aren’t the only wild things at this neighborhood shop, either. Cats, chickens, a ferret, and other assorted creatures, including an occasional horse, can be found there, too.

In nominating Wild Rumpus, Jennifer Sheridan of HarperCollins (who was PW's 2015 Sales Rep of the Year), wrote: “This charming, unique, and magical place that specializes in children’s books is one of the best in the nation. Long a favorite destination for the community, and the entire Twin Cities region, this store is a favorite of authors as well."

For the second time in three years a HarperCollins sales representative, Anne DeCourcey, has been named PW Sales Rep of the Year.

New England Independent Booksellers Association executive director Steve Fischer recommended DeCourcey. “Her accounts adore her," he said.

DeCourcey also has a connection to the children's bookselling world. She worked at the bookstore owned by her mother, Marilyn Hollinshead, Pinocchio Bookstore for Children in Pittsburgh (now closed).

Look for in-depth interviews with the 2017 award-winners in the May 15 pre-BookExpo issue of Publishers Weekly.

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Published on April 03, 2017 14:06

A ‘Gatsby’ Reboot Traces a Black Family’s Fortunes

This content was originally published by JADE CHANG on 3 April 2017 | 1:49 pm.
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K.L. Ricks

NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US
By Stephanie Powell Watts
371 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

Do we struggle through the world as it is, or do we choose our own lives? Even the ability to ask that question is a hard-won privilege for the characters in Stephanie Powell Watts’s skillful riff on “The Great Gatsby,” which revolves around a contemporary black family in a declining North Carolina town.

Which doesn’t mean that “No One Is Coming to Save Us” is some kind of Jay Z Gatsby fantasy. There are no parties up at J J Ferguson’s new place on Brushy Mountain Road. There’s hardly even any furniture, and definitely no soft rich heaps of beautiful shirts. J J doesn’t seem to care about those things. His dreams of Ava, the novel’s Daisy, aren’t wrapped up in a desire for fortune and status. No, what the virtually orphaned J J wants is family, which Ava has in the form of her mother, Sylvia, who takes on the Nick Carraway role even as she refuses to remain just an observer.

Watts writes about ordinary people leading ordinary lives with an extraordinary level of empathy and attention. “One of the tricks of time,” an older character realizes, “is that your own ordinary life took on a sweetness in the retelling.” Ava works a drab but respectable bank job and is married to a man whose handsome face doesn’t make up for his marginal employment. She concentrates on trying to get pregnant, despite their faltering relationship. Meanwhile, Sylvia yearns for her absent son, Devon — J J’s childhood friend — and tries to fill his place by forging unexpected connections. The unspooling and answering of all these hopes becomes the rich center of the story.

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“The Great Gatsby” is, at its core, a book about wanting things. Watts is interested in what black people are allowed to want — and allow themselves to want — in 21st-century America, and what it takes to venture a real claim for a place, a home. She notes that instead of asking where you live, many African-Americans will ask where you stay, as if a house were a temporary shelter rather than a home. Although that divide bothers Sylvia, she knows it can be hard to see life as more than a condition to be endured. “You should get more out of life than just a ham sandwich,” her mother once told her. “But what?” she wondered. “Her mother should have told her what more she should be expecting. Two ham sandwiches?”

That’s the source of J J’s allure. He has chosen to expect something more. “This man in front of her thought he could star in his own adventure, be the hero in his own story. Sylvia smiled at him, this strange creation.” He never quite manages to spin Watts’s readers up in his visions of the future, but that may be a testament to the difference between Sylvia and her counterpart in Fitzgerald’s novel.

The ways in which “No One Is Coming to Save Us” intersects with and veers away from Fitzgerald’s familiar plot can be very rewarding. (In one small but perfect joke, Gatsby’s dock becomes J J’s deck.) Every departure can be seen as a sly comment on what it means to be a person of color in today’s America.

The novel’s intricately plotted relationships pay off satisfyingly in its final chapters. When Gatsby didn’t get what he wanted, the story could only end with his death, but Watts’s characters are people who have seen generations of dreams stymied and thwarted — for their kin, their community and themselves. Rather than giving up if the game doesn’t go their way, they do what they’ve always done: Forget the rules, shake up the players and turn Gatsby’s green dock light gold.

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