Paolo Gioradano's debut novel has sold over a million copies around the world and earned him Italy's premier literary prize, the Premio Strega. Now, finally, we've earned our taste of his celebrated book here in the states. The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a book of striking beauty and disturbing content, including anorexia, cutting, loneliness and guilt. It's a coming-of-age story in the most awkward and lovely tradition, and its two protagonists are destined to win hearts here just as easily as they have abroad.
Giordano is a young author - only 27 - and his acclaim is all the more impressive given that he's a physicist by trade. He'll be here in conversation with his editor and now head of her own eponymous imprint, Pamela Dorman.
News of Note
Staff Picks
Housekeeping
Written by Jessica
by Marilynne Robinson (Picador, $14.00)
I don't know really how to talk about this book, which is a small story of two sisters raised by an increasingly eccentric parade of relatives, living in the lakeside town of Fingerbone. It seems deep and cold and quiet and full of mysterious life -- like the lake itself which has a train wreck at the bottom. It's the best meditation on loneliness and the competing desires of wandering and making a home, freedom and respectability, that I've ever read. For quiet, philosophical moods, where the rightness of the words makes the tragedy bearable.
From A to X
Written by Dustin
by John Berger (Verso, $22.95)
This is the most romantic book I've read in years and, strangely enough, I don't mean that as an indictment. Real correspondence gives its writers too much space to wax grotesque with their cursive passions and self-regarding love. Here, instead, an epistolary grown in the narrow spaces of resistance. It's beautiful.
Freddie and Me
Written by Jessica
by Mike Dawson (Bloomsbury, $19.99)
When Dawson spoke at our store he opined that, in an era of CGI special effects, superheroes are better on the big screen and the memoir is the form best suited to comics. He proves it here with a dreamy, episodic, gently self-deprecating story of a British kid in America obsessed with the band Queen. It's really a meditation on what we remember from our lives and why. It's also lovely and funny for anyone who was ever a self-dramatizing adolescent.
I don't know really how to talk about this book, which is a small story of two sisters raised by an increasingly eccentric parade of relatives, living in the lakeside town of Fingerbone. It seems deep and cold and quiet and full of mysterious life -- like the lake itself which has a train wreck at the bottom. It's the best meditation on loneliness and the competing desires of wandering and making a home, freedom and respectability, that I've ever read. For quiet, philosophical moods, where the rightness of the words makes the tragedy bearable.
This is the most romantic book I've read in years and, strangely enough, I don't mean that as an indictment. Real correspondence gives its writers too much space to wax grotesque with their cursive passions and self-regarding love. Here, instead, an epistolary grown in the narrow spaces of resistance. It's beautiful.
When Dawson spoke at our store he opined that, in an era of CGI special effects, superheroes are better on the big screen and the memoir is the form best suited to comics. He proves it here with a dreamy, episodic, gently self-deprecating story of a British kid in America obsessed with the band Queen. It's really a meditation on what we remember from our lives and why. It's also lovely and funny for anyone who was ever a self-dramatizing adolescent.