This book isn’t about that. It’s about what happens after.

When my girlfriend abruptly ended our relationship over a casual lunch as carefree as she ordered her kale salad, I thought my life was over. I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to pick up the pieces and move on; I didn’t want to pick up any pieces and I certainly didn’t want to move on. But very soon after, I wanted to move out.

They say that when one door closes, another opens. For me, the door that opened was directly above me. No sooner than the day my relationship ended, two new, special, tenants moved into the unit directly above me. Two girls. Two girls who debated the merits of a guy bringing a condom on the first date:

“Is it weird how I’m offended that he expected it, but also impressed that he was prepared for it?” Such a complex cocktail of emotions going on right above me.

In the state that I was in, the last thing in the entire universe that I wanted to hear were two girls basically having their very own 24-hour slumber party. I was a fly on the wall. Trapped. Unable to leave.

Pretty soon a psychosis started to form; I began responding to them. They couldn’t hear me. So I was basically talking to myself. I admit now, it sounds crazy.

Eventually, though, I soon realized something. These girls, an annoyance at first, inadvertently began to help me get back out there. You see, my relationship was a long one. In the span of time I was in it, the dating landscape changed dramatically. Texting, Facebook, Instagram, the Kardashians. I was setting sail in uncharted waters. And these two girls actually became my captains.

In between discussions about which one of them is more of a “Carrie” from Sex and the City (neither, they’re both “Samanthas”) and season 3 of The Real Housewives, occasionally a gem of insight would emerge and it would be something I could take with me as I attempted to get back out there and date again.

They pretty much became the Jiminy Cricket to my Pinocchio… If Jiminy Cricket owned the new Balenciaga Tote Bag.

I was like a government spy, deciphering code, weeding through their ridiculous conversations to get to the gold that could help me. In my post-relationship haze, these two girls and our one-sided conversations were all that I had. I went from wanting to stab knives into my ears to actually beginning to care about these girls. But I couldn’t let them know that I can hear them. That would ruin everything.

The girls above me were helping me more than anyone else I had in my life . . . . Only they didn’t know it.

Celebrity fan alert! Lena Dunham (creator of the HBO hit Girls) and Zach Galifianakis (break-out star of The Hangover films) are both fans of Dear Girls Above Me! Lena Dunham calls Charlie McDowell “the hapless, wit-soaked everyman who is attempting to bridge the gap between the sexes like a very skilled, and freaking funny, anthropologist of the Kardashian era.”

Get a sneak peek! Download an excerpt of Dear Girls Above Me by Charlie McDowell.

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Dear Girls Above Me appeared first on Read It Forward.

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A: The short answer is no. I had a compulsion to write rather than a particular story that I was desperate to tell. The germ of the novel was a scene with a group of students sitting in a pub at the beginning of a night. I didn’t know anything more about it than that, but I had a sense of a style and voice that I wanted to explore, and so I began.

The rest grew out of the act of writing. I certainly didn’t want to tell the story of my own experience of Oxford (which was far too uneventful), though I was well aware that as a twenty-two year old with little life lived, the student lifestyle was something that I knew well. I had done the research. There was a whole fund of local color I could draw from, but the plot is pure fiction.

Q: Noughties features a wonderful ensemble of characters, particularly our narrator, Eliot Lamb. Do you see pieces of your own personality in him?

A: It is perhaps inevitable that there are some similarities – like Eliot, I studied English at Oxford and came from a comparable background. However, Eliot is meant more as a general embodiment of the follies of youth than a personalized reflection of myself, and certain aspects of his personality are deliberately exaggerated and distorted. I didn’t want him to be an immediately likable or too easily sympathetic character (so in that respect I will obviously plead distance!).

Eliot has many faults – he is frequently pompous, prey to all sorts of snobberies and received opinions, and extremely self-involved. It was important that he encompassed as many of the less-attractive qualities of youth as the appealing, and this made his voice far more interesting to inhabit than it would otherwise have been. All of this said, I relate very much to Eliot’s mixed emotions of excitement and anxiety, nostalgia and regret, self-doubt and ambition.

The generic aspects of a “night out” that we witness in the novel are things I can certainly relate to – the drink, the embarrassing dancing, the regrettable fast food before bed. There is plenty of that in the book, both affectionately and ruefully presented. Maybe in years to come I will live vicariously through Noughties and marvel at the things my body could once do.

Q: Eliot has a very distinctive voice. What was the inspiration behind this?

A: The thing that particularly intrigued me about Eliot’s voice was its awkward relationship to his studies. He arrives at Oxford fairly rough around the edges and quickly finds that his head is being filled with a chaos of knowledge, mostly literary and philosophical, mostly perplexing, and he simply doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s where the voice comes from – a painful mixture of the colloquial and the literary.

And Eliot is forever prone to seeing the world – or at least attempting to – through his reading, in all sorts of inappropriate and often comic ways. But, importantly, this only takes place in his head. When he actually speaks to other characters, he is stuttering and uncertain, and would never dare refer to anything remotely intellectual (other than when he is flailing in tutorials).

I had to evolve a particular style for this. It needed to be excessive and sometimes overwritten in order to capture the pomp of youth – that feeling that your most mundane experiences are in fact, in your case, somehow exceptional and weighty. But of course they rarely are. In that sense the title of the book is ironic: Eliot would like to think he is at the center of something important and historical (perhaps another symptom of youth). His voice reflects that yearning.

However, events soon deflate his pretensions. I hope that the novel doesn’t do this in a judgmental or cruel way though. I think that the contradictory emotions of youth – from self-aggrandisement to self-doubt, narcissism to loathing – can be very touching. Eliot is ultimately a lost and confused soul searching for his place in the world.

Another enjoyable aspect of writing Eliot was his unreliability. Perhaps most people that age are ready-made unreliable narrators, forever having to learn the gap between their perceptions and reality. Eliot begins university with quite rigid preconceptions about what he will find there and proceeds to graft these onto the reality he is presented with. So there are plenty of crude stereotypes. But as the narrative unfolds, we see how the people around Eliot just won’t fit into the neat boxes he has prepared for them. This causes him all sorts of problems – some comic, some sad. If Eliot can be said to undergo a journey, it is from seeing the world in general terms to seeing it with more particularity, though the journey isn’t necessarily completed, and there are plenty of obstacles and getting lost along the way.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I am currently working on a second novel, though I am unhelpfully tight-lipped about its subject. I have learned the hard way that novels change shape and direction very unexpectedly and are rather vulnerable things, so I feel the need to protect it in mystery for now. I am also in my third year of a Ph.D. at Cambridge, focusing on the relationship between style and morality in late-twentieth-century British fiction. I guess that’s still pretty tight-lipped actually, but slightly less so.

RIFers! Have you read Ben Masters’ novel Noughties? Leave a comment with your review!

The post Ben Masters Calls His Narrator “A Painful Mixture of the Colloquial and the Literary” appeared first on Read It Forward.

As conflicted as I am about my eBook reader, I will continue reading on it. Of course I will. And I will continue bringing books home from the book shop and lining my shelves.

Here’s why I have a love-hate relationship with my eBook reader:

1. Dozens of books in my bag (love). This is a good thing, considering I used to have to pack a separate (very heavy) carry-on for all my books whenever I went on vacation.

2. I can’t read in the bathtub (hate). I know some people do, but I’m too much of a klutz. One slippery mistake and (splash!) my beloved eBook reader is kaput.

3. I can look stuff up while I’m reading without leaving the couch (love). Whenever I don’t know a word or a historical figure or a place, I’m just a click away from becoming a more informed reader.

4. I can’t dog-ear my pages or write in my book (hate). I know my eBook reader has bookmark and note-taking functions, but it’s not as satisfying as turning over the page or jotting down a note in the margin.

5. My eBook reader doesn’t smell like a book (hate). I miss that smell. I love putting my nose in a freshly cracked-open hardcover and inhaling. Yes, I really do that.

RIFers! What do you love (or not love) about your eBook reader? Tell us in a comment!

The post 5 Reasons I Have a Love-Hate Relationship with My eBook Reader appeared first on Read It Forward.

I knew that I wanted to try my hand at a novel, so I purposefully stayed behind in the city for an extra two months, working in my ex-college’s buttery and kitchen as a waiter, silver polisher, and general food-disposal system in order to pay my way while I got started.

Every summer the college becomes a summer school for undergraduates from the U.S., and I was on hand to serve them their food and point them in the direction of the bar, all the while thinking about my idea for a student comedy and where it might go. With the morning shift out of the way, I would head over to the café in Blackwell’s bookstore and get a couple of hours writing in before the afternoon shift.

Those early weeks of a project are the most exciting. You write with little calculation or sense of pragmatics, instead just finding a voice and dreaming up a handful of scenarios within which you can test its limits. There is still so much to be discovered during this stage that it becomes a compulsion, an imperative even, to get to a desk every day and add some more words to the page.

Once the American students had all left for home, I moved down to London where I was due to start a postgraduate course in the journalism school at City University. This was my halfhearted attempt at securing a “legitimate” career, but truthfully all I wanted to do was keep writing.

In the fortnight building up to the start of the course, when I should have been getting through a disheartening list of dry journalism textbooks, I found myself buried in the British Library, obsessing over what was fast becoming Noughties, and planning hypothetical English literature theses that I knew would probably never get written.

It was there that I received an intriguing call from the BBC. An application I had made several months previous for a nonpaid placement on a forthcoming literary series had been successful. They needed me to start straightaway and, impulsively, I said yes, which meant never enrolling for the journalism course. The series was called Faulks on Fiction – a four-part study of the English novel and a selection of its most famous characters, presented by British novelist Sebastian Faulks.

Some of the more glamorous jobs I carried out while at the BBC included running around Knightsbridge in search of a teapot and a very specific kind of exotic tea bag sold only, it transpired, at Harrods; collecting Sebastian’s coat from lost property at Waterloo station; spending cold nights alone on various bridges filming sunsets on a camera I didn’t know how to operate; and following the ongoing saga of Sebastian’s beard, ascertaining that it was kept at a consistent density between shoots.

A personal highlight was a day’s filming with Sebastian and Zoë Heller, author of Notes on a Scandal. At last I would get to rub shoulders with real living authors – successful writers, just like I wanted to be. Instead, however, I spent the day on my own sitting in the cameraman’s van at the bottom of Hampstead Heath while they filmed, in case a traffic warden showed up. But, as it turned out, being alone in smelly confined spaces was a highly productive part of the placement for me. In fact, I would frequently disappear to the toilets at Television Centre, lock myself away, and sit reading through whatever I had written for Noughties the night before.

Following on from the BBC placement, Sebastian asked me to carry out research for the show’s accompanying book. It was during this time that I finished the first draft of Noughties, raided the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook for literary agents’ contact details, and sent the manuscript (unsolicited) to my eventual agent.

Writing the novel had been a quick but intense process. This seemed necessary – not only did the narrative demand a certain amount of speed and reckless energy, but I could also feel myself as a first-time writer outgrowing it and becoming distracted by other newly forming ideas.

By the time Noughties appeared between covers, two years after finishing that first draft, the prose no longer seemed quite my own and I was intensely preoccupied with the writing of my second novel. Nonetheless, it was an immense fillip to hold my first book, and it spurred me on to go even harder at my next attempt.

Six months later it appeared in the U.S. – a real thrill for someone brought up on U.S. television, music, and books. All of that waiting, cleaning, and polishing in college finally seemed very worthwhile.

The post Ben Masters on the “Reckless Energy” of Writing Noughties appeared first on Read It Forward.

Something 20s
A lot of you are in the flapper, art deco, speakeasy mood – or just pre-gaming your next movie date – by reading The Great Gatsby and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

Keeping it Classic
To Kill a Mockingbird, Atlas Shrugged, Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, The Hobbit – you’re revisiting some of your favorites.

Popular Series Are Still Going Strong
A few of you are reading the Game of Thrones, Hunger Games, and Harry Potter series. Hopefully not in the same sitting!

Perhaps Some RIF Winners?
From A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, to Queen of the Air and Confessions of a Sociopath, we’re thrilled you’re reading some of our latest recommendations.

Your Dark Side
We got chills just seeing how many of you recommended multiple titles from Dean Koontz, Stephen King (Under the Dome a clear favorite) and his son Joe Hill (NOS4A2 was also high on the list).

Your Boldest Recommendations
Lots of erotic romance suggestions here, with the 50 Shades Trilogy, S.E.C.R.E.T., and a BDSM selection. Think we might have to turn on the air conditioning a little early, here in the office!

Keeping Reading in the Family
Moms and daughters alike commented that they were reading together, which is always a wonderful thing.

You’re Also Reading…
Tina Fey’s Bossypants, Maeve Binchy’s A Week in Winter, Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, WILD, The Night Circus, and Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power round out the list of top recommendations.

Want more? Check out the full list of 2,700 recommendations and pick your next great read!

The post Top 25 RIF Recommendations
(Plus the 2,600 Runners Up) appeared first on Read It Forward.

Dive into the excerpt below and experience the anticipated debut of Grantland editor Jay Caspian Kang. A #1 Critics Pick, Time Out New York calls it “a modern, satirical detective story… Kang’s writing is funny, stylish and definitely of the moment.” The Dead Do Not Improve is available in paperback from Hogarth wherever books are sold.

The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang – Excerpt by Crown Publishing Group

RIFer Sharon posted her review to Goodreads. We’re grateful to her for passing it on! Have you won a book from Read It Forward? Share your review with us by posting a link below. You might be featured in our Reader Spotlight!

The post Reader Spotlight: The Dead Do Not Improve appeared first on Read It Forward.

There’s Harry Potter‘s always-unruffled Mrs. Weasley, the strong and smart Mrs. Murray from A Wrinkle in Time, and the hard-working and loving Marmee in Little Women.

These are among the favorite fictional moms our readers mentioned this week. Without a  doubt, they’re all impressive women, model mothers, and yet . . . the Mom characters I can’t stop thinking about are of a different type altogether.

Maybe it’s because I like my novels on the dark side, maybe it’s because these women haunted me long after I turned the last page.

Whatever the reason, these five Moms top my list, and they’re all tragic mothers in literature.

Ma in Room by Emma Donoghue
This book devastated me. I devoured it in one sitting, then walked around my house for hours in a daze. Narrated by five-year-old Jack, Room is the shocking and surprisingly tender story of a woman and child living in unspeakable circumstances. Jack’s mom, Ma, manages to make a room feel like a world for her boy.

Edna Pontellier in The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Back when I was teaching college English, this was one of my favorite classics. My students loved to debate the ending: did she or didn’t she? (I won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t read.) Edna is a bird in a gilded cage: trapped in her domestic life, she desperately wants to experience something that’s just for herself.

Sophie in Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
I would read the phone book if William Styron wrote it. His writing is that exquisite. In Sophie, he introduces us to one of the most tragic characters in 20th century fiction. “Sophie’s choice” is now a noun, used to describe an agonizing, impossibly difficult choice. If you haven’t read this novel, do it now.

Josephine Hurst in Mother, Mother by Koren Zailckas
The author of the bestseller Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood turns her hand to fiction, with startlingly good results. Watching the “perfect” domain of this always-in-control mother begin to crumble around her is a dark delight. She may not be an empathetic character, but she’s one you’ll never forget.

Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I adore Clarissa: she’s one of my very favorite voices in fiction. The entire novel is one rather ordinary day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s genius is how she discusses life, death, war, and love – all from the perspective of a well-to-do British woman busy planning a party. It sounds dull, but it’s not.

Do you have a favorite “tragic Mom” from books, film, t.v.? Tell us in a comment!

The post 5 Tragic Mothers in Literature appeared first on Read It Forward.

A Mother’s Day Mystery Box full of a randomly selected mix of 10 books a mom will love: romance, thriller, memoir, cookbooks, craft books.

THIS GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED. Comments posted by 11:59 P.M. (Eastern Time) on May 10, 2013 will be entered for the chance to win a Mother’s Day Mystery Box o’ Books. Winners chosen at random. Complete rules.

Nearly 2,700 awesome reading recommendations in the comments below! Thank you to everyone who entered and shared what you’re reading.

The post Enter for the Chance to Win a Mother’s Day Mystery Box appeared first on Read It Forward.

Make sure you’re subscribed at the top of this page. You’ll get a weekly email from us with info on how to enter our members-only Read It First giveaways.

Meanwhile, why not click around and get your first look at the next great book!

Here’s Kevin Kwan talking about his novel – enjoy!

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