Raw Shark Week: Game On

Tonight!

Steven Hall

reads from

The Raw Shark Texts

w/ Special musical guests

Blue Screen Love Scene

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

@

Wordsmiths

***the fine print***

Raw Shark Week: Advanced Studies

It’s Raw Shark Eve. We’re practically bouncing off the walls with anticipation of tomorrow’s festivities. Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts. Blue Screen Love Scene providers of ethereal dance pop. Refreshments. Free. @ Wordsmiths. 8PM. Be there.

So maybe you’re on the fence. You’re thinking about coming out, but you haven’t bought into the Thursday is the new Friday bit. OK. Here’s a roundup of links for you to explore the novel even further…

• No less a personage than Joyce Carol Oates explores “amnesia lit” and declares Raw Shark ““ingratiatingly literary”
• Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton reads from Raw Shark (must click link)
• Find out what it all means with the Unspace Exploration Committee
• More clues at the Annotated Raw Shark wiki
• Raw Shark on Squidoo
• Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes with Steven Hall
• The Onion A/V club does the iPod random shuffle thing with Steven Hall

Raw Shark Week: Also on the Bill

As excited as we are to be welcoming Steven Hall to Atlanta on Thursday night, I also can’t wait to see our musical guest Blue Screen Love Scene perform. BSLS plays an ethereal dream pop that you can dance to. When we were planning the event, the moment that Wordmsiths’ Russ shot me a link to BSLS, I knew that they were the perfect match for Steven Hall’s novel.

If you haven’t heard the band yet, check out their song I’m A Scientist.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Subscribers: you’ll have to click over to the blog to get your groove on.)

I’m partial to this one, because – well – I’m a scientist.  What’s better than busting a move to a song with lyrics about cosmology, electrons, relativity, and radiation?  Check out more of Blue Screen Love Scene’s music on their MySpace page.

Raw Shark Week: The Challenge

Steven Hall has made a special offer for attendees of Thursday night’s event. If you can crack the password on this site, you’ll be granted access to an extra 16 pages of the novel (The Prologue, which runs from pages -21 to -6). The pages are already typeset, so you can print them out, cut to them to size, and stick them in the front of your book. Hall has offered to sign copies on Thursday night for anyone who brings them in, and he notes that signed copies of this additional material is extremely rare.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention this:

Raw Shark Week: Origins

First things first. Stay calm.

By official proclamation I have declared this week Raw Shark Week as we count down to Thursday’s big event: Baby Got Books Reading Series, Vol. 3, featuring Steven Hall author of The Raw Shark Texts with musical guests Blue Screen Love Scene. I can not describe how excited I am about this reading, and I hope that you’ll come down and join us if you’re in the area. Hell, you should travel down here if you’re not in the area. It’s going to be excellent.

To kick off the week, I thought that it would be fitting to share some of the back story between Steven Hall and BGB. It all began with this post in which I wrote:

…Steven Hall, the author of The Raw Shark Texts is guest blogging at Powells this week. The book has been getting good reviews, and the author is being compared to Mark Z. Danielewski (MZD is one of the Hall’s friends on his MySpace page). “Moby Dick meets the Matrix” is what they’re saying. Which is all very nice, however, the author begins his first guest post with this:

“Ahhh blogging, that fantastic digital mash-up of random thoughts, half-baked product placement, free stuff and alcohol-induced slander.”

I’m four beers into my evening, so I should point out that I have it on good authority The Raw Shark Texts was written with the blood of kittens that the author strangled in his back yard – with his bare hands – in his underpants – on the dope. Free books. I once had to change a flat in the rain.

Zing. I was young. Naive, even. Never did I think that the author would read my post, much less comment upon it. But he did. The very next day on the Powells blog, Steven Hall replied:

— I was talking about how I approach my own blog writing (or, more accurately, how my own blogs always seem to turn out!), I was speaking about myself, not passing judgement on anyone else! …
So sorry for any confusion, and a special sorry to the nice folks at babygotbooks.com who despite taking those comments to heart a little bit, still gave my book a very decent plug. Thanks guys, I have a kitten blood special edition here on my desk waiting for you if you want it. Give me a shout

Oops. If you’re going to take umbrage, you should have your facts straight. I took the author up on his offer, and a few weeks later a package arrived from England with a “kitten blood special edition”, which was the UK edition with this title page:

The author had also arranged for the US publisher to send me a copy. Somewhere in there, the Canadian publisher also sent me a copy that was famously almost stolen from my front porch. My bookshelf looked like this:

That’s awesome time three. It worked out great. I read the Canadian edition, and Mrs. Got Books read the US edition at the same time. We were able to talk about the book while we both reading it. Definitely buy two copies if you haven’t read it yet and hand one off to a friend.

In addition to all of that coolness, the book is simply amazing. After reading the book, I contacted the author, and he agreed to be the very first author interviewed here.  When this book tour was announced, Steven Hall actively lobbied his publisher to come to Atlanta to read for us.  We were not on the original tour schedule.  Here’s the relevant text from the author’s MySpace page:

The exact dates and locations aren’t set yet (I’ll post them up here as soon as I have them) but it’ll looking like it’ll be the second or third week in April with possible events in – Long Beach, CA., San Diego, CA, Sacramento CA, Boston and Portland, Maine. And Atlanta hopefully (I’m really pushing for this one BGB folks, I really am!).

The book has won the 2007 Borders Original Voices Award, and it is short listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Be sure to join us tomorrow for Day 2 of Raw Shark Week.

Steven Hall Reading Update

Author Steven Hall has posted his upcoming US Tour dates. The important date, for the purposes of this post, is the last one. See if you can tell how that date is different from the rest…

Tuesday, April 15th
Ann Arbor MI
5:30pm—Borders Original Voice Awards Ceremony
31410 Lohr Road, Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
Phone: 734.997.8884

Wednesday, April 16th
Birmingham MI
7:00pm—Borders
34300 Woodward
Birmingham, MI 48009
Phone: 248.203.0005

Thursday, April 17th
Westlake OH
7:00pm—Borders
Promenade of Westlake
30121 Detroit Road
Westlake, OH 44145

Friday, April 18th
San Diego CA
7:00pm—Borders
1072 Camino Del Rio N.
San Diego, CA 92108
Phone: 619.295.2201

Saturday, April 19th
Long Beach CA
2:00pm—Borders
Los Altos Market Center
2110 Bellflower Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90815
(562) 799-0486

Monday, April 21st
Sacramento CA
7:00pm—Borders
2339 Fair Oaks Boulevard
Sacramento, CA 95825
Phone: 916.564.0168

Tuesday, April 22nd
Portland ME
7:00pm—Borders
430 Gorham Rd.
South Portland, ME 04106
Phone: 207.775.6110

Wednesday, April 23rd
Boston MA
7:00pm— Borders
255 Grossman Drive
Braintree, MA 02184
Phone: 781-356-5111

Thursday, April 24th
Atlanta GA
8:00pm—Wordsmiths Books
545 N McDonough
Decatur, GA 30030
For more on this one, see www.babygotbooks.com

Thanks for the shout out! As you can see, the Baby Got Books Reading Series stop in Atlanta is Hall’s only visit to the Southeastern US and his only stop at an independent book store on this tour (which is fair – this tour is centered around receiving the Borders Original Voices Award)

This is an excellent excuse to post this again:

Poster by Jtrav