Stuart Rojstaczer's Blog, page 9
December 9, 2014
A little of the TMS news fit to print
At the end of November, The Mathematician’s Shiva crept back into the SF Chron’s bestsellers list (it was number 12). 12 weeks out and it still has legs! It’s a recommended holiday gift buy at Scientific American and at the Jewish Book Council (but you don’t have to be a math geek or Jewish to buy TMS as a gift for a friend or loved one, honest). I’ll be on the nationally syndicated radio show West Coast Live on December 13th (10:00 AM PST) and will be giving a reading during AGU Week in San Francisco at Alexander Book Co. on December 15th (early, 5:00 PM).
November 12, 2014
New and Newish Movies I’ve Liked This Year
Most of the Oscar winners for 2014 will be showing for the first time over the next month or so (and I hope to see several of them), but here are the recent movies I’ve watched this year so far and liked.
The Great Beauty
her
Blackfish
Hava Nagila, The Movie
In A World
Fruitvale Station
Wadja
(Untitled), yes that’s really its title
Paul Williams Is Alive
12 Years A Slave
Inside Llewyn Davis
Cutie And The Boxer
Le Week-end
Ida
Chef
In Bruges
Boyhood
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
Like Father, Like Son
Find Me Guilty
Ernest And Celestine
Birdman
Beware of Mr. Baker
The Stuey for Best Drama goes to The Great Beauty (best movie I’ve seen in years). The Stuey for Best Comedy goes to In A World. Best Documentary Stuey goes to Blackfish. Best Foreign Film Stuey goes to Ida (and yeah, I know The Great Beauty is a foreign film, too). Best American Drama Stuey goes to Boyhood. Best Animated Movie, Ernest And Celestine. Best Actor, Toni Servillo. Best Actress, Lindsay Duncan. All results tabulated by Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
November 11, 2014
Readings in Florida
For any Floridians or friends of Floridians, I’ll be reading, doing a Q&A and giving figure skating instruction (it’s never too late to learn) at a few places in the days ahead.
Books & Books, Coral Gables, November 14th, 8:00 PM
Bookstore1, Sarasota, November 17th, 1:00 PM (just a quick signing of stock copies, but if someone shows I’ll have a cup of coffee with them)
Inkwood Books, Tampa, November 17th 7:00 PM
I’ll also be at the Greater Miami Cholent Cookoff in Aventura on 11/15 (as an unofficial taste tester).
November 6, 2014
Amusing (and informative!) interview at UWM
Amusing and informative interview with Prof. Michael Nosonovsky at the UWM Jewish Studies center. We look like brothers. It seems like something filmed in Minsk or Kiev for Soviet television, circa 1987, except for the fact that we’re speaking in English and smiling. My mother would have loved it!
October 31, 2014
Where To Buy Signed Copies of TMS
For the holiday season, I’m going to a few Bay Area stores on a regular basis and signing stock copies. Please check with the store beforehand to make sure they have a copy left. If they’ve run out, just tell them to call me and I’ll go sign some more ASAP.
In Palo Alto: Books Inc. in Town and Country Shopping Center
In SF: Booksmith on Haight Street.
In Pleasanton: Towne Center Books on Main Street
Books Inc. in Mountain View, Book Passage in Corte Madera, and Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley may also still have some signed copies available.
Review of The Mathematician’s Shiva in the NYTBR
In the print version, my book is below a picture of a woman with tomatoes on her head. Fortunately, there are no rotten tomatoes in the review!
THE MATHEMATICIAN’S SHIVA
By Stuart Rojstaczer
Penguin, paper, $16.
Rojstaczer’s first novel and its narrator — the atmospheric scientist Alexander Karnokovitch, known as Sasha — are also haunted by the newly dead: Sasha’s mother, Rachela, who dies of cancer at the novel’s opening. Rachela was a world-famous mathematician, and so her shiva is attended not only by family and friends but also by her fellow mathematicians, who descend upon Madison, Wis., partly to discover if Rachela has left behind the lucrative solution to the (real-life) Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. This is a full — sometimes overfull — novel, but you can never really complain about a book being too alive, too curious, too alert, too true to itself. Sasha is the key: Not only does he have a fine, self-deprecating sense of humor, he’s also allowed his humanizing flaws. The first time he meets his long-lost daughter and granddaughter, for instance, his response is unsentimental and decidedly non-paternal: “My daughter’s name was Andrea. My granddaughter was Amy. Pleasant names both. Easy to pronounce.” The novel works for the same reason the humor does: It is smart, and brutally honest. Late in the narrative, as the shiva winds down and the visiting mathematicians make one last brainy sprint to discover the solution to the famous math problem, Sasha rants about how Americans treat any show of intelligence as a display of bad taste. If he’s right — and he is — then “The Mathematician’s Shiva” is in very bad taste, and all the better for it.
Brock Clarke
October 23, 2014
The Mathematician’s Shiva Gets A Rave Review in the NYT
It’ll be in the NYT Book Review on November 2nd. I’ll post it then and I’m grateful beyond words.
October 16, 2014
TMS is back in the ABA Top 50
Truly unexpected, unlikely and amazing. It’s been in the top 50 for four out of the last five weeks.
October 9, 2014
TMS is back on the SF Chronicle / NCIBA bestseller list
You can find the list here. Amazing stuff for a debut novel about a bunch of crazy emigre mathematicians sitting around and talking for seven days.
October 7, 2014
A country where students do well in math
is also a country that loves The Mathematician’s Shiva. Well, at least its major newspaper does. Singapore’s The Straits Times gives TMS four and a half stars and says, ““[The] writing is witty with insightful commentary…. His characters are well-developed, and they remain very much alive in my mind, days after finishing the book.” Thank you!
