So Many Precious Books, So Little Time

When I started the stories that became the nexus of this novel I had a notion of several family members with their separate but linked experiences forming some kind of collective experience. I wanted to create a series of fictional family daguerreotypes, each somehow touching upon the divine. I had a lot of personal material in the voices of my own family and family friends I wanted to write about, as well as many events I'd read about and cooked up, and I had some larger-than-life, magical aspects of these characters I wanted to express. As I wrote, I found myself working my way back to the immigrant experience, and I realized that I wanted to start with the story of the old matriarch as an innocent child. I knew the child of the Old World would be forced to come to the New World, but I didn't know she was going to be fleeing possible criminal charges when I started. I knew she was going to lose her mother. I knew she would suffer tremendous emotional hardship and somehow become a young wife and mother and foundation of the family in America.

John Addiego has published numerous stories and poems in literary journals and is a former poetry editor at the Northwest Review. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Emily, in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches students with special needs. The Islands of Divine Music is his first novel.

Thanks so much for making my blog a stop on your virtual tour John!

Now for the Giveaway:

Thanks to John and Caitlin Hamilton Summie of Unbridled Books, I have one signed copy of this book to give away. You can read my review here.

Here are the rules on how to enter:

1. For one entry, leave a comment. Please be sure to include email address so that I can contact you if you win.

2. For a second entry, post about this giveaway on your blog and leave link to your blog post in the comments. You will also get an entry for each person who tells me that they learned about this giveaway from you.

3. For more entries: You will earn an extra entry for each comment you leave on my past, present or future blog posts until the end of this giveaway.

4. The deadline to get your entries in is Friday December 19th, 2008 12:00 Midnight E.S.T. Once I notify you that you've won, you will have 3 days to respond. After that, I will need to choose a different winner.

Posted by Teddy Rose at 11:16 PM    

Labels: Guest Author