Yesterday was the on-sale date for my new novel, Ten Days in the Hills. Huffposters may have been wondering what the lovely red icon to the right on my posts is (and oh, the publisher did a beautiful job on the cover!) and now it can be told--
Ten Days in the Hills is a lot like my posts on the Huffington Post, except there is much more sex and, of course, since it is a novel, there are many characters (ten major, six minor) who are NOT BASED ON
ME OR ANYONE I KNOW! Ten Days in the Hills takes place in 2003, in
Hollywood, at the beginning of the Iraq War, and was inspired by my
reading of The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio. As you may know,
Boccaccio was not shy about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and I do
love The Decameron! Let's call Ten Days a remake ("Not in 657 years has
there been a novel like TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS!"). In addition to the
sex, the Bush administration comes in for a whipping, as you can
imagine. My old friend Barbara Grossman, who used to be the publisher
of Viking and who has read all of my books in galleys, says, "This is
her best one." (That is the only blurb I will include here.) Ten Days
owes a lot to Boccaccio, and one thing I thank him for is his ability
to crack jokes during the Black Death (1348-1351). In Ten Days, I have
made an attempt to emulate him in that regard.
Ten Days went on sale yesterday, and can be purchased from your local
independent bookstore, Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and other
online bookstores. It can also be purchased from the Random House
website. I have had lots of interviews over the last week or so, and
you may look for them on the websites of the L A Times, the Washington
Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. This Sunday night, I
will be talking about Ten Days on the Laura Flanders show, Radio
Nation. Other media is planned, but not the Today Show or anything like
that.
If you would like to read the first 2500 words of Ten Days in the
Hills, please go here, on the Random House Website.
For the next thousand words, please go to my own new website (launched
today), here.
If you notice anything strange about my website, it is because I went
out in the backyard and whipped it together myself (with thanks to
iWeb). It contains pages about books, politics, horses, and food. There
is another therealjanesmiley website which I instituted, and which
comes up on google, but has nothing on it. The .mac site is the real
real jane smiley.