Robert Westfield

I'm the author of SUSPENSION, a dark comedy that was released in August by the good people at HARPER PERENNIAL. "What's it about?" Still hard to say. Not because I don't know!, but because describing it too much spoils the read. CHARLIE HUSTON, author of Six Bad Things and Already Dead, calls it a "book that's never where you expect it to be. I don't generally stay up past midnight reading books anymore. This had me up two nights running." Would Charlie have stayed up past midnight if he knew the book was going to turn the way it does? No. Or from JOSH KILMER-PURCELL (I Am Not Myself These Days) who called it a "comedically suspenseful page turner - with enough twists and turns and back stories to ensure that the book never leaves your hands until they're all resolved. Perfectly." MARTIN MORAN (The Tricky Part) called it "a wild ride of a book," PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY called it "a raucous debut," and KIRKUS called it a "head-spinning romp." DAILY CANDY and AOL BOOKS both picked the novel as one of their summer reads, the tough graders at ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY gave it a B+, and one of my favorite writers in the world, MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, (The Hours and Specimen Days) gave me a seizure when he said this: "Just in case anyone was worried about where the new novelists were going to come from—the ones who’d be able to bring a fresh voice and vision to the world as it is right now—here’s Robert Westfield, with a beauty of a book that delves with almost frightening acuity into culture, sexual identity, and violence on both personal and global levels, among other vitally important matters. The fact that he is able to do so while creating fully human, comic and tragic characters, and to move them through a compelling story, is little short of a miracle." I just blacked out again. All right, briefly, the novel is about someone who locks himself in his Hell's Kitchen apartment in August of 2001 and after September 11th decides to stay inside for the rest of his life. But it's best not to know why he retreats into his apartment, it's best not to know why, after seven months, he comes back outside, or what happens when he does. The book deals with the sad (and somewhat funny) fact that most of your life happens behind your back, decided by other people in other rooms, while you're acting on information that isn't at all, in any way true. Another thing you should know about me is how much I love cities and that I have the deepest affection for New York, the one I've lived in for the last eighteen years. In fact, over the last decade, I've given tours of the city to 30,000 people from across the country and around the world. Last February, I launched LITTLE BYTES OF THE BIG APPLE, video tours of the city. In the first season we shot eighty videos, or bytes, and have posted over forty of them. The fourth movie begins posting at the end of February, 2008, with a new byte every Monday. For much more information on the book, on the author, on the tours, you can check out my website: LittleBytesOfTheBigApple.com Home | Browse | Search | Invite | Film | Mail | Blog | Favorites | Forum | Groups | Events | Videos | Music | Comedy | Classifieds