Skip to main content

Come Celebrate Charong's Novel, Random - And My Birthday - Friday January 27th

Charong Chow: photo by Alexander Chow-Stuart.

This Friday evening, January 27th, between 6pm - 8pm in the private room at the Starbucks at The Junction in Sonora, Charong Chow will be hosting her book launch party for her first novel, Random...and I will be celebrating one thousand years on the planet (or something like that): my birthday!


Inspired by the death at 26 of our best friend, Jeremy, who first introduced us at one of my book readings in Miami's South Beach, Random is a Young Adult "teen noir" love story and thriller, set in contemporary Los Angeles.


Tierney is a sixteen year old high school co-ed who's neither the Bad Girl in school, nor exactly your average student, either. Excited by the arrival of Tom, a handsomely mysterious new kid, Tierney skips classes with her best friends, Jeremy (who's openly gay) and Maya, taking Tom along for a drug-fueled truancy that foreshadows darker things to come.

Written with an energy and razor-sharp dialogue that mixes teen angst and ennui with the shadows of a Hollywood long past - a Hollywood explored in a visit to Tom's grandparents and to the Griffith Observatory (famous for a key sequence in Rebel Without A Cause) - Random is powered by the sense of loss of the author's best friend, creating an energy that is part contemporary noir mystery and part emotional catharsis.



Charong will also be appearing tomorrow morning on KVML 1450AM in an interview by Mark Truppner that will be broadcast at 6:45am, 7:45am and 8:45am.


The cover of Charong Chow's Random, designed by Nancy Choe.


10% of all sales of Random between now and the end of the school year in June, will be donated to the Sierra Waldorf School in Jamestown - a progressive school that is dedicated to nurturing the individual capabilities of each child from pre-school to eighth grade, following the inclusive and inspirational teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf Education.


Charong Chow's Random is available both as a paperback from Amazon, priced $8.88 (eight is the luckiest number in Chinese), and as a Kindle download, priced $5.99 (or free if you are an Amazon Prime member).


Please note that you do not need to own a Kindle to read a Kindle book. You can download a free Kindle app from Amazon for your Mac, PC or smartphone at this Free Kindle Reading Apps page.

Charong and I hope you can join us Friday night between 6pm - 8pm at the Starbucks at The Junction for a joint celebration.

Warmest wishes,
Alexander and Charong

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye

Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film plays with references to Old Hollywood and opens and closes with the song, Hooray For Hollywood ), the building has another direct connection to Raymond Chandler. It was apparently the inspiration for Chandler in his book, The High Window (the first Chandler novel I ever read), in which Chandler describes the residence of Philip Marlowe as being on the cliffs above High Tower Drive in a building with a fancy elevator tower. (Thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians Southern...

Andrew Hale and Sade

Sade in concert in San Jose. All concert photos  Copyright  © 2011  Alexander Chow-Stuart. On Thursday evening, we saw our longtime friend Andrew Hale perform with Sade at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, in one of the most beautifully conceived and produced concert performances I have ever seen. Sade is a rare musician, in that she and the band only write, record and tour every eight to ten years, so that in a very real sense you can measure your life by her. The band's music is always fresh and always newly conceived - for their previous album, Lovers Rock , they stripped everything down musically to a minimalist sound and banished the saxophone that had been so much a part of Sade's heavily soul- and jazz-influenced style. The latest album, Soldier of Love , released in 2010, is one of the most tender, moving collections of songs yet, from the astonishingly beautiful Morning Bird , which features exquisite keyboards from Andrew, to the soulful, retro, r...

The Story Behind the Immortal Bass Line of Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side (VIDEO)

Of all the tributes to, and stories about, Lou Reed over the past week, this is one of the most fascinating - even though it doesn't directly concern Reed himself, but rather Herbie Flowers , the legendary British bass player who created the immortal bass line that opens Reed's massive solo hit, Walk On The Wild Side. When I first heard Walk On The Wild Side, it seemed the ultimate late night New York song: a transgender story (which apparently radio stations in the 1970s and since didn't even pick up on, despite the line, " Shaved his legs and then he was a she ") featuring characters from Andy Warhol's Factory , which sounded as if it had been recorded at about 1 am in some smoky lowdown basement hangout in the East Village. The video above reveals the immense influence of Herbie Flowers - who had worked with David Bowie , who produced Walk On The Wild Side and the Lou Reed album it came from, Transformer , on Bowie's own classic breakout s...