“People will talk to you at the table, so you become a collector of stories almost passively.”ĭiofebi’s Paradise, Nevada (Bloomsbury, Apr.) is a sprawling novel about the people who live and work in Las Vegas, set in 20. In 2013, he moved to Las Vegas and went pro.ĭescribing what he observed at the poker tables, Diofebi says it was an opportunity to soak up stories from people he might not have otherwise encountered, such as gun lobbyists and “Silicon Valley libertarian types,” who struck him with their raw sense of individualism. While he was in school, poker had risen in popularity, and afterward, he found a way to make money by playing online. “None of my friends had jobs, and Italy was in a rough place,” he says. With the European job market in shambles after the 2008 financial crisis, Dario Diofebi completed his MA in comp lit in Rome, his home town, in 2010. “While I was reading this, I could already start to feel like I knew the pitch, and I could see exactly what the audience is. “I’ve been at Little, Brown for 20 years, and once every three or four years I find a book that I feel completely obsessed with,” she says. “And Chris was like, ‘Oh, that’s never happened to me.’ ”Įditor Judith Clain was immediately gripped, as well. “Jen wrote back a really detailed, thoughtful email, four days after I sent it to her on a Sunday at 11 p.m.,” Andrews says. “I wanted to write a commercial book, which feels like a dirty word, but I wanted to write what I wanted to read, and, you know, I like reading.” She asked her husband, novelist and Harper’s editor Christopher Beha, for advice on agents and sent the book to Jennifer Joel. I don’t think I actually ever had that grit, but I like that she just sticks to it.”īut, Andrews notes, the book wasn’t driven by a personal story.

She’s going to be a famous writer and nothing’s going to stop her.

She’s offered a plan B and doesn’t want it. “Then you hit 25, 26, and paths start getting shut off, and you’re shunted in this one direction, and you’re like, how did I get here?’ What I like about Florence is she just refuses to take no for an answer. “So many of us grow up being told, ‘You can do anything you want, the world is your oyster,’ ” she says. In PW’s starred review of Who Is Maud Dixon? (Little, Brown, Mar.), a psychological thriller about a young woman who loses her publishing job in a desperate act of self-sabotage and ends up working for a reclusive, Elena Ferrante–esque writer, we said readers might be left asking, “Who is Alexandra Andrews?”Īndrews never worked in publishing, though she remembers the awkwardness and insecurity of going to literary parties in her 20s, which she channeled into her frustrated writer protagonist, Florence.

Department of speculation