Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Gabrielle Zevin is an internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed author, whose books have been translated into thirty-nine languages.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry spent several months on the New York Times Best Seller List, reached #1 on the National Indie Best Seller List, was a USA Today Best Seller, and has been a best seller all around the world. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction and the Japan Booksellers' Prize, and was long listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, among other honors. The Toronto Globe and Mail called the book "a powerful novel about the power of novels."
Her debut, Margarettown, was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program and was long-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. The Hole We're In was a New York Times Editor's Choice title. Young Jane Young won the Southern Book Prize and was one of the Washington Post's Fifty Notable Works of Fiction.
She has also written books for young readers. Elsewhere was an American Library Association Notable Children's Book, a finalist for the Quill Award and the California Young Reader Medal, and was long listed for the Carnegie Medal. It won the Borders Original Voices Award, the Ulmer Unke, and the Sakura Medal. It was recently named to Time magazine's 2021 list of the 100 Best YA Novels of All Time.
She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She and director Hans Canosa adapted her novel Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (ALA Best Books for Young Adults, NYPL Books for the Teenage) into the Japanese film, Dare ka ga Watashi ni Kissu wo Shita. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR's All Things Considered, and she began her writing career at age fourteen as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Her Modern Love column was recently read by Sandra Oh for the Modern Love podcast.
Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles. Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was published by Knopf in 2022, and is being developed into a feature film by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios.
Gabrielle Zevin's website
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Even though he's so cantankerous, bookstore owner A. J. Fikry is impossible not to love. Where did his character come from?
I sold my first novel about ten years ago, and let's say Fikry came from
just under a decade of experiences in publishing. Fikry's the culmination
of many, many conversations at publishing lunches and dinners, and ill- to
modestly attended bookstore events, and book conferences in summer.
He's a little bit Silas Marner, a pinch of Mr. Darcy, and—dare I
admit this?—a dash of myself, too.
Your fictional store, Island Books, has the slogan "No Man is An Island; Every Book is a World." How does that apply to Fikry?
The slogan is something A.J.'s first wife, Nicole, wrote, or at least modified from John
Donne. Even before Nicole died, A.J. wasn't necessarily the most gregarious bookseller
or person, and the slogan is a reminder from Nicole to A.J. not to shut himself
off from the world. There's a danger in reading, or in any intellectual pursuit, for it to
become too solitary and myopic, but I believe a true intellectual has a desire to share,
to teach. In many ways, that's A.J.'s journey—from resident of an isolating, intellectual
island to citizen and ...
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