The Gone Away Place

It’s been forever and a few days since I last posted anything on my website, but I wanted to make sure to note that today my new novel, The Gone Away Place, releases from Knopf Books for Young Readers. I’m excited as always to have a new book go out into the world, where it will hopefully find the exactly right readers who didn’t know they were even waiting for it, as well as those who have been eagerly anticipating it.

THE GONE AWAY PLACE

Some early reviews have already come in. Here are a few excerpts from those:

Barzak shows his expertise in conjuring a palpable sense of otherworldliness in this sad and eerie tale set in Ohio. The gray aura of tragedy might be oppressive if not for the book’s suspenseful elements and glimmers of light, small miracles that inspire hope and emotional healing. Ellie’s quest to find Noah and help other ghosts who want to be released from their bonds to earth is highly spiritual and deeply moving.  -Publishers Weekly, Starred Review  (Full Review can be found here.)

A Stranger Things–Twister mash-up for fans of (super)natural thrills. -Kirkus Reviews (Full review can be found here).

Ellie’s journey through the grief of her tremendous losses is one that will deeply impact readers, many of whom will identify with the experience of having friends or loved ones die unexpectedly. Barzak’s personal, poetic prose deftly exposes the complexity of grief, particularly in Ellie’s eventual goodbye to her friends, which gives a tangible form to an emotional act. But most of all, this is a novel about the importance of stories, reminding readers to be seen and heard; this is what will move us forward, both individually and as a society. – Booklist (Full Review)

If you’re interested in supporting the book, here are some easy ways to do that:

1. Talk about it on social media.
2. Share and repost posts you come across about it.
3. Buy it at an indie bookstore.
4. Or buy it wherever you’d like to buy it.
5. Ask for it at your library if they don’t already have it.
6. Review it on Goodreads & Amazon.com and other sites.
7. Take and share pics of it, if you spot it in the wild or get your own copy.

Hashtag it #thegoneawayplace

It’s hard for books to rise above all the white noise online, so your support is extremely appreciated!

You can purchase the book at:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Indie Bound

Or any other place where you like to buy books, of course.

Thank you, and if you read it, I hope you enjoy it!

Wonders of the Invisible World paperback giveaway

There’s a giveaway for trade paperback copies of my Stonewall Honor award winning novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, at Goodreads for the month of October. Click over through the link below to enter for a chance.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak

Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

Giveaway ends October 29, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

 

Signed Copies of Wonders of the Invisible World

wonders coverIn just less than two weeks, my new novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, will be released. I’m incredibly excited for this book to find its way to readers. The local book launch event for the book will be held at Barnes and Nobles in Boardman, Ohio on September 11th, at 7 PM, where I’ll give a reading and then sign books for attendees. Please join if you can. If you want, you can RSVP on the Facebook invitation to the event, so B&N has a general idea of headcount for the event.

For those of you who aren’t local but would still like a signed copy of the novel, you can pre-order signed copies from the loveliest bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, A Room of One’s Own, who will be sending books with signed bookplates to readers who order the book through them.

You can call or use a special pre-order page on their website. Info is here:

To pre-order via the bookstore’s website, click here. 

By phone:
608.257.7888

Thanks very much for your pre-orders, wherever you may be ordering from. Every copy helps!

Wonders of the Invisible World ARC Giveaway

Just a note to let anyone coming across my site that two advance readers copies of my next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, are being given away at Goodreads. Click the link below to enter to win the book ahead of its release date, September 8th, 2015. You have until August 14th to enter.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak

Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

Giveaway ends August 14, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Before and Afterlives and The Shirley Jackson Award

In all the hustle and bustle that lead up to the release of “Jamie Marks is Dead” I failed to report a fantastic bit of news that occurred in mid-July. As I’d mentioned in an earlier post back in May, my short story collection Before and Afterlives had been nominated for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award in the category of Best Single-Author Collection. In July it was announced that I had won the award. In fact, there were two winners: my collection and Nathan Ballingrud’s amazing collection, North American Lake Monsters.

I could not be happier to have this collection–something of a retrospective of the best of my short stories from the first decade of my life as a publishing writer–recognized with this award. Shirley Jackson’s work has been an enormous influence on me since I was a teenager assigned to read “The Lottery” in a high school English class, like so many of us from a certain generation were. Her small town spooks and just-on-the-edge-of-surreal thrills spoke to me on so many levels. To have my collection of stories recognized in her name is really, as they say, a dream (or perhaps in Shirley’s case), a nightmare come true.

I’d like to thank Steve Berman, my publisher at Lethe Press, for believing in my stories and for bringing this collection out into the world. I’d also like to thank Alex Jeffers for the gorgeous interior design, and Steven Andrew, who designed the cover, which I still look at from time to time and think, Damn, that cover is unbelievably fantastic.

Thanks, too, to the many editors of the magazines and anthologies that first published the stories individually.

Here’s a photo of the book and the award itself.

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Jamie Marks is Dead released!

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Jamie Marks is Dead, the movie based on my first novel, One for Sorrow, in Cleveland, Ohio, with a bunch of friends and family. It was so good to finally have others who I’m close to, people from my community, see it as well. Before it had felt a little bit like Big Bird’s relationship with Mr. Snuffleupagus. No, really, there is a movie out there adapted from my novel! It’s not just imaginary!

Here is me and the director/screenwriter, Carter Smith, who made a surprise guest appearance to do Q&A with me after the screening.

Me and Carter

The film debuted as one of sixteen competitors in the dramatic category at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. From there it went on to screen this past summer at Newfest in NYC and Outfest in LA. Now it’s in a limited theatrical release in major cities, as well as also available on video on demand platforms.

Here are the cities where it’s playing:

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And here are the video on demand platforms where you can purchase it or rent it to watch in your own home:

I hope as many of you out there as possible can watch it too. It’s really a dream of a film. I mean that. It feels like a dream, or a nightmare, that you wake up from more than a conventional film. When the Washington Post reviewed my novel when it first came out, they said, “Traveling through this story with Adam is like a nightmare, but the kind that fascinates you so deeply that when you wake up, you grab the first person you see and tell him about it.” The film feels that way to me too. So I hope you enjoy the pleasures of dream logic. 

The New York Times recently reviewed the film incredibly favorably. I hope you find it as fascinating as others are finding it. 

Jackson and Nebula Award nominations

It’s been a few months since I last updated here. Since “Jamie Marks is Dead” debuted at in the Sundance Film Festival competition in January, a lot of other really wonderful things have occurred.

First, I was nominated for a Nebula Award in the category of Best Novelette for my story, “Paranormal Romance”!

Picture

This is the fourth time I’ve been nominated for a Nebula Award. The first time was in 2007 for my novelette, “The Language of Moths”, and the second time was in 2010 for my novel-in-stories, The Love We Share Without Knowing. The third time was in 2011, for my novelette, “Map of Seventeen”. Clearly the novelette is my category!

I’m always honored to be named a front runner for the Nebula Award, and this time is no different.

imgres-1Secondly, my collection of short stories, Before and Afterlives, has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, in the category of Best Single-Author Collection. I’m ecstatic to be nominated for this award. I started out as a short story writer, and it remains the form I feel most affection for, regardless of my becoming a novelist too. For Before and Afterlives to be nominated in the Best Collection category is the proverbial dream come true for me, both because the book collects many of the short stories I wrote over my first ten years as a writer, but also because Shirley Jackson has been a huge influence on me as writer for years and years. I constantly go back to her strange and eerie stories from the 1950s and 60s and the still hold immense power for me as a reader (and as a writer). For my stories to be recognized as a body of work for this award is really affirming for me.

barzak-before-and-afterlives_200x300

The semester at Youngstown State University, where I teach fiction writing, has finally ended, and I’m looking forward to a productive summer of writing. More news when I have any to share. Until then, I hope everyone reading this has a great summer.

And good luck to all of those nominated for the above awards.

Thank You, Carter Smith

This past weekend, I had the privilege of seeing my first novel made into a film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The novel is called One for Sorrow. The film is called Jamie Marks is Dead. Early on in my novel, the narrator, Adam McCormick, observes in his high school yearbook after Jamie Marks is found murdered, that he and Jamie share the same page, the same square even, but Adam’s photo is on one side of the page, and Jamie’s is on the other. For me, coming away from watching Jamie Marks is Dead feels similar to that moment of two people’s souls blurring and mingling into one.

Carter Smith, the director and screenwriter for the film, kept that moment intact, actually, as well as a lot of the novel. Though there are some changes, the story has retained the essence of the book for me. I’ve already noticed some fans of the novel online who had managed to see it at Sundance mention the changes from book to film, but that’s the nature of novel adaptations–they modify a very large story, 320 pages in this case, to fit into an hour and forty minutes of screen time. Novels and films are two different forms, and taking a novel into the film format will, by necessity, mean some things will have to change. Unless the adaptor is doing a literal translation of book to film, which for me always falls flat, simply because the two forms don’t do the same things, don’t function in the same ways (though they do have crossover points, obviously).

So in this adaptation of One for Sorrow, you’ll see that it’s a troubled single parent household instead of a troubled two-parent household, that Adam comes from. There’s no grandmother in Adam’s memory who taught him how to count crows to the counting crows nursery rhyme, which explains the change in title. And instead of squatting in an abandoned church, Adam squats in an abandoned warehouse. Some events in the book have been collapsed, or moved around in time. There are some pieces of dialogue that have been moved from one scene in the novel to a different placement in the film. And there’s even at least one entirely new scene that Carter created for the script that I absolutely love (involving the ghost of Frances Wilkinson), and that feels entirely organic to the story, made from the same essence of how I imagined Frances in the novel. 

I loved every moment of it, even the changes. Carter created a visual poem using the imagery and motifs of the novel, and watching the film was absolutely fascinating for me to see all of those codified metaphors and symbols unfold on the screen like one of those flower teas that, once dropped in water, seem to bloom and bloom again, until they fill their container.

The film focuses on the relationships between the teenagers in the novel, so other side storylines have been pushed into the background or excised altogether, and that, I think, was the entirely right choice to make. Those were the relationships and that was the storyline that were the center of the novel, too. Novels have room for background characters and side plots that might make a film feel clunky and overpacked if absolutely everything was brought over in the transfer.

This movie is dark, cold, blue and green. It holds the essence of winter and death and regret and longing inside it. And somehow, hope flowers in its darkness. That’s the book, too, really, or what I hoped I’d achieved as the tone and essence with the novel.

So I feel like I couldn’t have asked for me and my story to have been placed into better hands. Carter and his cast and crew made something I can feel good about being a part of. I can’t wait for people to see the absolutely gorgeous cinematography that Darren Lew brought to the film, too. It’s dark magic, the look of the entire thing.

Park City is unlike any place I’ve ever visited, and is the complete opposite of my daily life in the declining town of Youngstown, Ohio. A tiny skiing town nestled in the mountains, where Christmas apparently never goes away. Lights were strung from street corner to corner, throughout the trees, ever so precious that even the bulbs in the trees were made to seem like seeded berries. The people at the festival seemed professionally beautiful, as if they’d stepped out of magazines, and they lined the streets waiting to get into overfull restaurants and huddled around each other in the hopes of getting off the wait list for certain movies.

For most of the premiere day, I was nervous and felt like I was swimming through a haze, couldn’t collect my thoughts well, and kept bumping into things or feeling dizzy, much like Adam in the novel does after the body of Jamie Marks is found. But when I arrived at the theater, Carter appeared out of a knot of people and when I saw his smile everything seemed to go back into focus. I went through the media tent with him and the actors, who happen to be some of the nicest, warm people I’ve met, and any nerves I might have had that day were just gone in an instant. It helped to see the actors and Carter himself also felt anxious. I think being around everyone who had a stake in the film allowed for an easier pre-show experience of butterflies.

The lights went down, the lights went up, and everything afterward has felt a little altered for me. I’ve felt a bit like the character Adam in the days since, feeling like I’m seeing two worlds merging together in front of me, back and forth, one laid over the other. I feel stunned, to some extent, but in a good way. My vision will come back into focus again at some point, like it did when Carter came out to greet me and the proverbial light from the lighthouse brought me back in to shore safely.

Other than life (thanks Mom and Dad!), I think this may be the greatest gift anyone has ever given me. In the book, Adam gives words to Jamie to help him sustain a meaningful existence in his afterlife. At one point, Adam learns the power of the words, Thank you, which you would think a simple thing. But simple things are reduced in significance by overuse, a flattening of meaning by the scripted nature of our daily lives and that’s a loss for all of us when we fall into routine engagements with the world.

I learned the significance of Thank you some years ago, when I needed the help of other people to get through a dark period and other people did, in fact, help me, even when I felt at my most alone. I learned the power that connecting with others can have, with making friendships and relationships that make life worth living. And I learned that giving back and forth, that exchange between our individual spirits, binds us together.

To see and be seen, to be understood and to comprehend another.

This has been one of the most meaningful exchanges I’ve ever experienced.

So I want to say thank you to Carter Smith, who has given my words back to me in a different form.

In an interview he did at Sundance, he said after reading One for Sorrow, he was haunted. After seeing Jamie Marks is Dead, I want to say, Likewise. I’ve been bumping into things in the days since I left Sundance. Walls, lockers, people. Doesn’t matter what, I’m walking into it.

And I’m glad it was you.

Finalist for storySouth’s Million Writers Award

A new awesome thing:

My story “Invisible Men” (originally published in Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse Online and reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction) is a finalist for storySouth’s Million Writers Award!

The award is given out annually to celebrate the best short fiction published online. Needless to say (but I’ll say it): I’m thrilled to be recognized, and for that story to be recognized especially.

So here’s the thing. A jury selected the top ten finalists, but the winner is selected by popular vote. So if you’re reading this, please consider the list of potentials and vote.

Vote for my story, of course! 😉

You can venture over to the storySouth Million Writers Award website and find the listing of finalists by clicking here.

And you can find the voting form by clicking here.

Thanks for voting!

Wonders of the Invisible World goes to Knopf!

I have good news (following on the heels of a rough past two months). Today it was announced that my next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World has been acquired by Knopf Books for Young Readers!

Here’s the announcement in Publishers Weekly:

Melanie Cecka at Knopf has acquired a debut YA novel from adult novelist Christopher Barzak, called Wonders of the Invisible World. In it, a teenager must unravel a generations-old family curse before it destroys those he loves. Publication is set for fall 2015; Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary brokered the deal for North American rights.

To say the least: yeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssss!!!!!!