Alex Austin's Blog, page 3

Fascinating Review

On the site "Reading Other People," Nick Rossi reviews the new novel. He begins, "Atmospheric and literally quite breathtaking, Alex Austin’s “Nakamura Reality” is an exercise in beauty." In that first sentence, he hits on two things that I was really going for: accurate descriptions of the California coast and canyons, and prose that reflects their splendor. Rossi has a lot of interesting takes on the novel. You can read the full interview at


http://readingotherpeople.com/categor...

Nakamura Reality Giveaway

My publisher is giving away 25 hardcover copies of my soon-to-be-released novel Nakamura Reality (starred review in Publisher's Weekly). To enter go to https://www.goodreads.com/bo…/show/26... and enter the giveaway

Some Film Studio Interest

On my publisher's website, an update on Nakamura Reality plus the confessions of a writer.



http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogs...

Publishers Weekly Review of New Novel

Publishers Weekly just published a starred review of my new novel Nakamura Reality. The star means that NR will be featured in PW when the novel is released (February). Here's the link.
http://new.publishersweekly.com/978-1...

Here come the reviews

One of cyberspace's top arts bloggers just reviewed my upcoming novel Nakamura Reality. Check out the review at http://enriquefreequesreads.blogspot....

Waiting for the rain

I grew up in New Jersey and remember countless days standing at my bedroom window watching the raindrops slide down the pane. For a boy rain ruined everything. It certainly didn't get you out of school, like snow; it turned the baseball fields to mud and the woods into wet, sticky, gloomy places. It flattened meticulously pomped hair. Soaked your stash of Playboys hidden in the thickets. I never thought I'd miss it. Now, decades later, I'm in California, sitting in Starbucks and praying, no, not praying, not wishing either, not even hoping, but wanting rain. I'm thirsty for rain and if the skies suddenly burst, I'd go outside, tilt my head back and open my mouth. There have been signs: a savage downpour in the northern county, a flashflood in the desert, but most of the state has gone untouched. No significant rain or snow for many years. Water restrictions, forests in trauma, foothill vegetation turned to tinder. But there's a god that many say is about to come to our rescue. More a Greek god than anything else. El Nino: a band of warm water currents that develops way down in the southern Pacific and when strong, changes everything. This year it's strong, super-strong, the scientists say, and almost can't fail but to open the heavens as winter approaches. There will be record rainfalls and with a little of luck, it will turn to precious snow in the mountains, nourishing a snowpack that used to twenty-feet high even in summer, but now is little more than a glaze. I sit in Starbucks and look for signs that El Nino will fulfill its promise, and the monsoon will arrive, the gutters overflow and the dead grass rise. That night and day, I will step outside, tilt back my head and drink, and months from now, that I'll look out my window and wish the rain to stop.

Nominations

The publisher of my novel Nakamura Reality has informed me that he will be nominating the book for The Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award and Chautauqua Prize. All that remains now is to win. On a somewhat different plane, District Lit Magazine has nominated my short story "The Rat" for "Best of the Net 2015." If I could just get my old Honda to pass smog inspection, I'd be a happy camper.

Will You Read This Novel?

To followers of my blog who review on Goodreads or elsewhere, I'd like to make available PDFs of the typeset novel. If interested, contact me at alaust70@aol.com

The following is from a letter Permanent Press is sending out to reviewers and agents.

"Many of you have seen earlier electronic versions of Alex Austin’s Nakamura Reality months ago, and so this update. Our pub date is mid-February 2016 for this astounding first novel. It has so many different currents travelling throughout body of this book. It weaves between realism ad surrealism, resentment by a world famous Japanese novelist (and a member of the Yakuza), for an American who married his daughter. It’s about ingenious scheming, cultural clashes. Yet—above all—it is also A FIRST RATE THRILLER that we will be nominating for all the major mystery awards as well as for the major literary prizes."

Nakamura Reality is a different kind of novel and tough to classify. I'm looking forward to opinions from both reviewers and readers.

The Seeds of Nakamura Reality

In February, 2016, The Permanent Press will be publishing my novel Nakamura Reality. All novels emerge from experience, and I'd like to share what inspired me to write the novel.

The closest friend of my son Chris is his identical twin Alex, but during Chris’s first years of elementary school in Los Angeles, a Japanese boy named Hideki ran a close second. Hideki’s sudden return to Japan confounded Chris, whose first response was to demand that we make him Japanese. Fifteen years later, Chris journeyed to Japan to live and work, separated for the first time from his inseparable twin.

In Tokyo he immersed himself in Japanese life, including joining a judo club, competing in numerous tournaments and earning a black belt. He also met and married—in a traditional Japanese ceremony—a Japanese woman named Masumi. When they returned to the U.S. with their son, they lived in our home for several years. Their stay was my introduction to many aspects of Japanese culture which included a polite reticence on Masumi’s part that conveyed much more than she actually said. Out of my son’s fascination with Japan and my efforts to decode Masumi’s intentions, a story was forming, though still unclear, like a morning swimmer coming out of the fog.

When my sons were somewhat younger than the twins Hitoshi and Takumi of Nakamura Reality, I took them to a beach in the aftermath of a Pacific storm. Though the waves were huge, I gave into their pleas and let them go into the surf and immediately regretted my decision. In their search for catchable waves, they reached a point where the currents seemed to take control, pulling them out to sea. I shouted, ran into the surf, and started a hopeless swim but was immediately knocked down by a breaker. Getting to my feet to try again I glimpsed them atop a wave. The sea was carrying them back to shore. Meeting them in the surf, there were no pleas to paddle out again for they too had been scared. They hadn’t felt guilty, though I did.

The memory of that day’s terror and the lingering guilt I felt would weave its way through a cultural experience to inspire and shape Nakamura Reality.

Experiment

Nakamura Reality Cover


Nakamura Reality will be published by Permanent Press, NY, in January 2016. Permanent Press is a small but well respected publisher. "On a shoestring, putting out literary gems."--The New York Times

The following is the description of the novel that will be on the dust jacket.

To understand Japanese culture requires reading between the lines. This is Hugh Mcpherson’s challenge in Nakamura Reality, a beguiling blend of mystery, odyssey, inconsolable loss and obsession.

To rendezvous with a former girlfriend, Hugh Mcpherson leaves his surfing-obsessed sons on an isolated California beach. When Hugh returns, the eleven-year-old twins have vanished. A ferocious riptide has swept Takumi and Hitoshi out to sea, their bodies unrecovered.

Devastated by the loss Hugh and his Japanese wife, Setsuko, divorce. Severing all ties to America, Setsuko returns to Japan to live with her father, Kazuki Ono, a prominent author of mind-bending novels.

After grieving for ten years and longing for Setsuko, Hugh swims out to sea to drown himself. As he sinks, his sons appear to him, holding the last letter that he had sent to their mother, begging her forgiveness.

Abandoning his suicide, Hugh swims back to shore. The incident awakens memories that throw doubt on the accepted version of his sons’ deaths. Hugh’s doubts are intensified when he learns that Kazuki Ono has come to California to finish a novel called Fingal’s Cave, the tale of a brash American who marries a Japanese woman against the wishes of her father, a powerful businessman with ties to the Yakuza.

Provoked by his memories and obliquely revealing passages found in Kazuki’s books, Hugh begins a quixotic journey across the California landscape, encountering numerous characters of ill will and cross-purpose, but who inexorably lead him toward a film-industry firm called Nakamura Reality, the creators of a labyrinth that has enclosed Hugh for ten years and challenges him to separate reality from fiction to find his way out ... and perhaps back to his sons.

If you're interested in a discounted copy when the novel comes out, just let me know.