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At dinner last night at the Luxembourg Gardens with Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) and Joseph O'Neill (Netherland, which is the book Obama is reading), I realized something that should have been obvious.

When you're intent on something-when you look at it too closely or too often-every now and then you can't quite place it. It's like this with words. Stare too long at something as common as Hello: it can verge on the sense of trying to remember where you met.

And so. What I miss, too often, is how lucky I am to be a working novelist in America. These are, as the whole world knows, tough days for literary fiction. And it's never been the easiest career, even in boom times. Rejection. Financial uncertainty. Mean or dense critics. Good publishers that nevertheless have, at the end of each quarter, to answer to corporate bosses. Plus, the difficulty of composition. Blah blah blah. Everyone knows about this job, about the privations and snags of it.

But it's wonderful, too.

I like being in the company of other writers. I've found little (spoken) jealousy or pettiness. I think we all know what a hard field it is, and so are pretty kind to each other. And, of course, most good novelists are good talkers. Their minds make hairpin turns. (I admit that sometimes last night I fell off the edge of a conversation.)

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I hope you're all having a terrific summer!  I trust you've all been making time to relax, maybe hang out by the pool or the beach with a fun book, maybe even a fun math book...

Um, did she just say "a fun math book"?

Yep!  In fact, I'm very pleased to announce that the paperback edition of Kiss My Math (ages 12-14) is available as of June 30^th 2009, joining my first book in paperback, Math Doesn't Suck (ages 9-12).

Let's face it: Summer is a great time to brush up on math, so I'm really glad the Kiss My Math paperback has come out with plenty of summer left. I know that "extra math reading" probably sounds like a drag, but that's why I made sure my books are actually fun to read!   I mean, why shouldn't math books look like teen magazines? Why shouldn't learning math involve topics that teens are already thinking about, like popularity, breath mints and parties? Well, that's my whole philosophy anyway.

The good news is that you can review vital pre-algebra topics - or get ahead before the school year starts - with this very philosophy!   Turns out, distributing is as easy as remembering to say "hi" to everyone at a party. (See Chapter 10 in Kiss My Math for details.) 

Need to review exponents? Then you may end up meeting my dear friend, Ms. Exponent, in Chapters 15 and 16. She's the powerful executive who sits high up in her corner penthouse office, stiletto heels and all.  (She'll make an encore appearance in my third book, on Algebra, which comes out in August 2010.)