!How to Get Into the Twin Palms, by Karolina Waclawiak, is all over Salon’s ‘What To Read Awards.’ The debut novel made it onto four different critics’ top 10 of 2012 lists, and was Salon’s “Most Overlooked Book of the Year,” where Roxane Gay called it “beautifully written and so suffused with loneliness it makes you ache.”!
(Source: salon.com)
Abigail Deutsch reviews Karolina Waclawiak’s HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calling the book “illuminating” and “its own manner of spy novel.”
“Waclawiak’s novel (her first) reinvents the immigration story. How to Get Into the Twin Palms movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even as she goes up in smoke.”
Read the complete review here.
I kind of feel like Los Angeles is the last place where one can be charmed into thinking the American dream is still real. People move there every day to “make it” and reinvent themselves. I thought it was an interesting place to set a novel about trying to become someone else in a way that was not linked with Hollywood. The book deals with a Los Angeles that is completely detached from glamour. There is a moment when Anya is walking up Sunset Boulevard and staring at the Chateau Marmont and the billboards that line the street. She may as well be on Mars because it is so foreign to her, and yet she only lives a few blocks away. That is L.A. to me — pockets of wealth bracing themselves inelegantly against immigrant neighborhoods or less-prosperous areas. It’s also the perfect setting for a book about displacement and detachment because the city is almost like a vast orphanage. It seems as though everyone is searching for something, who to be most especially.
-Karolina Waclawiak, interviewed by David Ulin for the Los Angeles Times.
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
I loved the food and the culture. And the language! I’m such a language whore. I was repeating the words in what I’m SURE was mangled pronunciation and grinning to myself. The sensory input in the novel was fantastic. She really excelled there. You smelled things, you felt things, you saw things.
Great discussion of Karolina Waclawiak’s HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS over at Insatiable Booksluts that will probably definitely make you want to read the book.
(Source: insatiablebooksluts.com)
The New York Times ArtsBeat blog interviewed Karolina Waclawiak about “her resemblance to Anya [the protagonist of her novel], her favorite writers on L.A., how she would cast a movie version of her novel and more.”
Tonight, Waclawiak celebrates the release of her debut novel, HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS, at Word Bookstore. The event is being sponsored by the amazing folks at The Believer (where the author also serves as Deputy Editor), and will feature Waclawiak in conversation with interviews editor Ross Simonini.
Here are some of the other latest happenings for Waclawiak and HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS from the past couple days:
This is where I spend most of my time at home in Brooklyn. My desk is right next to our patio where we’ve created a bird haven. I have a little bird bath and feeder along with dozens of potted plants so the birds can feel at home. They line the railing while I’m working and chirp to the music…
The precise and evocative language of both novels is what lets us enter into these women’s minds, their neuroses, and their history. The details of the world in which Iris finds such solace and her story-like dreams are the most telling things about her. For Anya, it is her bodily reaction to the smells around her that holds the answer to what she truly wants and needs; how she feels about the smell of yeast, a man’s sweat on her sheets, homemade chicken soup.
These women, like many of us right now, are at a moment in their lives when their sense of reality is lost, and though they deal with this in vastly different ways, Iris and Anya look for renewal in the wind, in fire, in escape, in fleeting illusions. Where they look, ultimately, isn’t what matters, and is not the source of urgency that keeps us reading. What matters is the relentlessness with which they search for renewal at all. And their search, for now, will be my new definition of feminism.
"— From a fantastic essay by Sara Finnerty on Karolina Waclawiak’s How To Get Into the Twin Palms and Anne-Marie Kinney’s Radio Iris, over at HTML Giant.
(Source: htmlgiant.com)
I’ve always been a laborer first and an artist second. Inspiration comes from blue-collar experience, from manual labor, and the toil of workaday life. I think making art without a struggle to survive, or at least a struggle to become something more than you are, really results in disconnection from the very people that you hope will consume your art.
-Musician Jon DeRosa in conversation with Karolina Waclawiak, author of the forthcoming How To Get Into the Twin Palms (7/12), over at The Rumpus.
Here is the fantastic book trailer for Karolina Waclawiak’s How To Get Into the Twin Palms.
The book is out July 17. You can check out Karolina’s tour schedule here. You can pre-order the book here.
Credit goes to Dominika Waclawiak who directed the video, Ken Kurras for providing cinematography, and Jon DeRosa for the music.
Latest addition to our Small Press Favorites section: Two Dollar Radio!
“I felt her loneliness and wanted it. I wanted hers. I didn’t want mine anymore.”
—Karolina Waclawiak, How To Get Into the Twin Palms
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