Jess Walter

So Ghost Town was a May Indie Next selection, most anticipated from New York Times, LitHub, AARP, People, and more.

It's got raves from Jess Walter, Tayari Jones, Ron Charles.

Um, it also was made the...

I just heard this last night.

And so I went back to him, and I talked to a couple of really close friends.

One is Jess Walter, one is Robert Lopez, and one is my wife, Kate Leebone.

He said, listen, I'm thinking about doing this, but I want to work in a different way.

In the past, what I've always done is, if I'm writing a story or a novel or an essay, I don't show anybody anything of it until I get a draft of it.

Like what's the perfect prototype is Rebecca.

Or if I want to write like a page turning, but like love story, what am I thinking of? I'm thinking of beautiful ruins by Jess Walter.

You know, I'm thinking there's a book that sort of scratches the exact itch that I have.

And so maybe that's true for all my books.

And so, um, the book was...

it led me to look at a couple of other books as well, and the first book that it led me to [laughs] was a s- quite a surprising one, but the connection was at Mark Anthony, and it was a novel by Jess Walter, an American novelist, called Beautiful Ruins.

And that novel is set in the 1960s and the filming of, uh, during the filming of Cleopatra, the movie, this kind of scandalous movie where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor first met, and of course broke up both their marriages eventually.

Um, and in the, in Beautiful Ruins, a young woman arrives at this very, very remote and rather forgotten little village at the edge of the Cinque Terre.

How phenomenal is

that? Well, remember we did Ease and then I reviewed So Far Gone by Jess Walter, which was more about the exiting in the days of social media when you actually have to throw out your mobile phone and, you know, you can be traced.

So I find the whole thing fascinating.

Amazing.