How to get me to buy a book

It's so easy, really: simply have a reviewer write about it just so.

Rick Moody's new book (above) is the subject of a review by Elizabeth Hand which appears in today's Washington Post Book World.

"The Albertine Notes" is the last of three novellas in "Right Livelihoods."

From Ms. Hand's piece:

"The Albertine Notes" is speculative fiction for this century, steeped in the global post-traumatic stress disorder that is one legacy of 9/11. A dirty bomb has destroyed lower Manhattan and vaporized nearly half the city's population. Those who survive, such as young journalist Kevin Lee... have become addicted to a street drug called Albertine. The drug allows users to relive memories, "the actual event itself, completely renewed, playing in front of you as though you were experiencing it for the first time." But users can't control which memories will surface: They're slammed by a sensory tidal wave composed of trivia, desire, insight, trauma. As addicts drown in this drug-induced "riptide of the past," they lose their ability to remember huge blocks of the actual present.

"The Albertine Notes" is framed as a whodunit, with an increasingly paranoid Kevin attempting to find the User Zero at the center of the Albertine epidemic. But it's really a Proustian meditation on loss, a "light show of lost time" that describes not just personal but cultural grief, for a world and a past that are irretrievable, even in memory.

Sounds like a fever dream/mind meld of William Gibson, Philip K. Dick and Greg Egan, what?

How do you spell "Two-Day 1-Click®— FREE?"

$16.31 at Amazon.

Good: You can read an edited transcript from a New York Times interview with Rick Moody here.

Better: Listen to the entire 41-minute-long interview by clicking on the link below the headline on that same page.

Note to self: Look into the work of Ms. Hand with an eye to buying one (or more) of her books.

You can listen to her read the first chapter of her novel "Generation Loss" here.

Anyone who can electrify me with a couple paragraphs in a book review is worth exploring in more depth.