Stuart Rojstaczer's Blog, page 15
March 31, 2014
109 edited pages
Scanned and sent to meet deadline. 273 other pages seem to be more or less perfect as is. Hoorah! Soon to be (well in five months, to be precise) at a bookstore near you. I’ll get one more peek, but just a peek, before it gets printed.
March 22, 2014
The selling begins
Here’s the one sheet from the catalog. I get a readers guide (wonder what it’s going to say) and a five-city tour. Amazing. I’m very grateful. No audio version yet, but one can always dream.
March 19, 2014
It’s starting to look like a real book
So far, all I’ve found are very minor glitches in the galleys. I’m 20 percent through. Break time. Off to give a couple of elephant seal tours.
February 25, 2014
New novel, Better Than New York, off to agent
What’s it about? A community of Holocaust survivors in a midwestern city adapts to America and learns how to start anew. Through it all, an unsaintly member of the community, Yankl Blum, works behind the scenes to keep everything humming. Better Than New York provides an intimate view of a unique way of life and culture that followed World War II and quietly prospered in many American cities for decades.
An homage to the neighborhood where I was born (Gene Wilder was born there as well, albeit many years before me), Better Than New York is the most personal book of fiction I will ever write. I’m hoping for a pub date of fall 2016. Even my eyes and toes are crossed.
February 16, 2014
Mathematician’s Shiva now listed on Goodreads
And it’s available for pre-order on some web sites as well (support your local bookstore and wait awhile is my advice). Penguin doesn’t mess around. It works fast. The Goodreads listing is here.
February 11, 2014
My cover makes me happy
Even the penguin looks happy about it. Don’t trust me. Trust the cover. The book is good.
January 30, 2014
Penguin catalog description
It’ll look, more or less, like this. Right now, I’m going through the copy edits. Out at the end of August.
The Mathematician’s Shiva
A Novel
Stuart Rojstaczer
A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Everything Is Illuminated
Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave. To Sasha’s chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution—even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela’s notes.
Written by a Ph.D. geophysicist, this hilarious and multi-layered debut novel brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible.
• A Penguin Original
• Stuart Rojstaczer has written about education for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and his scientific articles have been published in numerous journals, including Science and Nature
• Rojstaczer drew on the experiences of his parents, Jewish immigrants who survived the Holocaust, to give depth to his characters’ backgrounds
• For fans of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart, and Aleksandar Hemon
Author’s website: stuartr.com
Stuart Rojstaczer was raised in Milwaukee and has degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and Stanford. For many years, he was a professor of geophysics at Duke University. He lives in northern California.
January 23, 2014
Got the layout and title page for Math Shiva today
Very clean and easy on the eyes. I’ve got a beautiful cover, a clean layout, a paid for book tour, and a boat load of ARCs. From here on in whenever something good happens to this book, I’m going to follow the time tested practice of my mother and spit on the ground three times to keep evil away. Pooh. Pooh. Pooh.
January 15, 2014
Mathematician’s Shiva cover reviews are in
“I like it!!!!” Daughter
“I love it!!!!” Agent
“Oooh! People are going to pick up the book and buy it just because of this cover.” Wife
“It’s beautiful!” Me, with a tear of joy in my eye.
I’ll post it when I get the version with the text.
January 6, 2014
Draft for next novel is done
Its working title is Better Than New York. A dozen or so rewrites await, and if all goes well I’ll see it in print in two years.
