Now I see why, when people sell their books, they just copy and paste the announcement from Publishers Weekly. I don’t really know what else to say.
Co-author of Forking Fantastic! and travel writer Zora O’Neill’s THE CRIMSON SOFA: Journeys Into the Arabic Speaking World, which uses the author’s twenty years of learning the thorny Arabic language and her travels in the Middle East and North Africa to shine a personal, illuminating and often humorous light on the diverse cultural and social landscape of the various Arabic-speaking countries, to Amanda Cook at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in a pre-empt, by Gillian MacKenzie of the Gillian MacKenzie Agency (World English).
To make it seem a little more concrete, I did a Google image search for “crimson sofa.” I got this. Hmmm.
And then this:
Which made me realize…duh, I have a crimson sofa. But I don’t look that glam on it, and I won’t be hanging out on it much in the coming year. The book won’t seem real until I start traveling and writing. First stop: Egypt, this fall.
Your book sounds great! I just started following you via Twitter so that I can look for it. I just started studying Arabic myself in preparation for impending move to Cairo, where my husband will work at the State Dept. And holy cow It’s HARD!
Thanks, Kat! It’ll be a while till the book is out, but at least I’ll have little adventures to report until then!
Good luck with the Arabic studies, and stick to colloquial as much as you can! (Or get started on it as soon as possible.) Don’t trust anyone who says you have to learn MSA/Fusha first–there are so many ridiculous rules, it actually prevents you from speaking. But Egyptian colloquial is easier (no dual!), and much more fun.
Zora, I thought the first picture was you as a child! Bwah ha! Congrats on the book, I hope “pre-empt” is code word for “big bucks.”
Sheri
I can neither confirm nor deny dressing up in such outfits in high school… But no, it’s not me!
And “pre-empt” did mean, if not a bonanza, at least more $$$ than I, the chronic pessimist, was expecting.