Review:

Globe and Mail

This is an ambitious tale featuring a dozen tech-savvy narrators from around the world who all make their livelihoods playing and scamming video games. The cumulative effect of so many interwoven stories is that new ones feel like a layer of the previous. While each of the narrators could have easily been the star of his or her own book, they are instead strands of Doctorow’s global web, proving that everything’s interconnected.

Emily Pohl-Weary, The Globe and Mail

New fiction: The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening

/ / News

Shareable.net has just kicked off a new fiction series, “Visions of a Shareable Future,” with stories about a future in which sharing is part of the norm. I have the inaugural story, “The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening,” which I wrote as a kind of run-up to getting to work on my next YA novel, Pirate Cinema, which will likely be a 2011 Tor Teen title. Both “Jammie Dodgers” and Pirate Cinema are the story of streetkids in London who remix movies and screen them in impromptu theaters — the sides of derelict pubs, ancient graveyards, vaulted Victorian sewers — and establish an alternative to the mainstream Hollywood industry.


You can fit eight Jammie Dodgers into a single-occupancy Leicester Square hotel room. Provided that they don’t all try to breathe in at once. We breathe in shifts.

Cecil knelt at the window, phone on the sill, careful marks he’d made with a sharp pencil and his laser-pointer showing the precise angles to each mirror. He looked around at us all, his eyes shining. “This is it,” he said. “My Leicester Square premier.”

The monocle is already glued to the phone’s back over the projector’s eye. The phone’s been fitted to a little movable tripod. And now, with a trembling fingertip, Cecil prods the screen. Then, quickly, nimbly, spinning the focus knob on the monocle. Then the hiss of air sucked over teeth and we all rush to the window to see, peering around the drapes.

He was much better on the focus this time, faster despite his trembling hand. There, on the marquee of the Odeon, Keith Kennenson as an eight year old, begging his mother to let him have a puppy, then a montage of shots of Kennenson with his different dogs, a mix of reality TV, feature films, dramas, comedies, the story of a life with dogs, the same character actors moving in and out of shot.

Shareable: The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening

(Image: Tilt and shift – Leicester Square at night, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from rthakrar’s photostream)

NYC tour stops

/ / For The Win, News


Hey, New York! I’m in town for the next-to-last stop of my book-tour for my new YA novel For the Win, and I’ll be at:

* Books of Wonder, May 26, 6-8PM
* powerhouse Books, May 27, 7:30PM
* McNally Jackson, May 28, 7PM

The tour ends on June 4 in Toronto, with a stop at the Merril Collection — can’t wait to see you! (full schedule)

Reminder: There are plenty of libraries, schools, halfway houses and shelters hoping you’ll donate a book to them.