Pessl, updated

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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The book folks at the N.Y. Times named Ashvegas native Marisha Pessl’s book Special Topics in Calamity Physics one of the 10 best books of the year.

Congratulations! If you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas gift, this book would be a great one.

We haven’t read the tome yet. We’re like the folks at Gawker – we’d rather just look at her, because she’s nice to look at, and poke fun at her when she does a dumb photo shoot, like the one she did for Glamour.

But back to the book. Here’s what the high-minded book critics had to say:

The antic ghost of Nabokov hovers over this buoyantly literate first novel, a murder mystery narrated by a teenager enamored of her own precocity but also in thrall to her father, an enigmatic itinerant professor, and to the charismatic female teacher whose death is announced on the first page. Each of the 36 chapters is titled for a classic (by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Carlo Emilio Gadda), and the plot snakes ingeniously toward a revelation capped by a clever “final exam.” All this is beguiling, but the most solid pleasures of this book originate in the freshness of Pessl’s voice and in the purity of her storytelling gift.

There’s more here