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The Penguin employee book club read  Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:

Is this book published in other countries, or will it be in the future?

Yes, as of today, Rooftops is being translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Hebrew, Persian, Korean and Icelandic. We're expecting offers from other countries as well.

What is the layout of an alley in Tehran? Is it similar to the cul-de-sac of suburban America?

I tried to bury the layout of the alley in different chapters, e.g. The Width of the Alley, My Friends, My Family and My Alley. It would have been odd for a 17-year-old narrator to describe the alley in much detail in a single chapter. Here's what we learn throughout:

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Attention bookclubs: We have SIX new reading group guides for our July titles.

Visit our Bookclub Home Page for hundreds of other guides.

Reading Group Guide: The Glimmer Palace by Beatrice Colin

Book: Paperback | ISBN 9781594483813 | 7/7/2009 | Riverhead | Add to Cart

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Reading Group Guide: Glover's Mistake by Nick Laird

Book: Hardcover | ISBN 9780670020973 | 7/9/2009 | Viking | Add to Cart

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Attention bookclubs: We have TEN new reading group guides for our June titles.

Visit our Bookclub Home Page for hundreds of other guides.

Reading Group Guide: Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

Book: Paperback | 8.26 x 5.23in | 448 pages | ISBN 9781594483820 | 02 Jun 2009 | Riverhead | 18 - AND UP

$16.00 - add to cart

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Attention bookclubs: We have FOUR new reading group guides for our May titles.

Visit our Bookclub Home Page for hundreds of other guides.

Reading Group Guide: How to Buy Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson

Book: Hardcover | 9.25 x 6.25in | 400 pages | ISBN 9780525951148 | 14 May 2009 | Dutton Adult | 18 - AND UP 

$25.95 - add to cart

Read the author's posts on the Penguin Blog and watch the video.

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Attention bookclubs! Penguin has new bookclub reading group guides for 11 new titles. Visit our Bookclub Home Page for hundreds of other reading group guides.

Reading Group Guide: English by Wang Gang

Book: Hardcover | 5.51 x 8.26in | 320 pages | ISBN 9780670020591 | 02 Apr 2009 | Viking Adult | 18 - AND UP

$24.95 - add to cart

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Read an excerpt

Reading Group Guide: The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide

Book: Hardcover | 6.29 x 9.29in | 320 pages | ISBN 9780399155598 | 02 Apr 2009 | Putnam Adult | 18 - AND UP 

$24.95 - add to cart

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The Penguin employee book club chose a poetry collection this month in honor of National Poetry Month. The club read Love Comes First by Erica Jong and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:

Inspiration is a very mysterious thing. Poems usually come with a first line or image and then I begin scrawling them in my notebook to see if they lead anywhere. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

Writing poems is very different than writing fiction. With fiction you can push yourself to write the next chapter, whatever it may be. With poetry, you really have to wait for inspiration.

The poems in Love Comes First were written over a 10 year period and I chose the very best of that period and left out others. Sometimes I’ll notice there’s a poem about a certain subject and then I’ll try to write about that subject, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

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The Penguin Employee Book Club will be meeting this month to discuss Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is the second "interactive" employee book club, where Penguin employees submit questions to the author and the author provides the answers. View last month's Q&A with Marlon James here. 

Penguin employees who are interested in joining the next interactive book club should look out for the HR announcement of the the next book club pick in early April!

1. In the additional material at the end of the Anniversary Edition you wrote that the idea of the book came to you in a nightmare.  Did you then do any research on teenage depression/trauma before writing the book? 

Honestly? Not much at all. 

The emotional landscape of SPEAK is very close to what ninth grade felt like for me. After the early draft was in shape I did some research to see if my depression had been unusual and found that, sadly, it hadn't been. When I wrote Speak my oldest child was in sixth grade. At the time, I thought that put me at a disadvantage because she wasn't quite an adolescent. Looking back, I am so grateful I didn't lean on her life's experience. I pulled from my own pain, observations of teens hanging out at the mall, and that magic that always sneaks into the writing process.

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The Penguin employee book club read The Book of Night Women by Marlon James and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:

1. You bring these characters and this time period to such vivid life. What kind of research did this novel involve? What resources did you have available?

I was already familiar with quite a bit about slavery, having studied it from high school days. It's the defining event in Caribbean history so you can't escape it even if you want to. Whether you're in history, cultural studies, music or economics, Slavery is the diaspora's Genesis chapter. So much of the history of slavery I already knew, but I still did a ton of research. History can be good at the what, when, where and even how, but not so much with the why. So I read slave narratives, master narratives, ship logs, tax records, pretty much everything. Histories of Fashion, costume archives, even weather patterns in the eighteenth century. The trick with research though is to not get so consumed with it that it becomes another form of procrastination. I had the first draft done before I did most of the research. As for resources, Jamaica does have an abundance of it, especially about slavery, but thank God for the internet or this novel would have taken twice as long.

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A bookstore opening up in el barrio? Yeaup! And they're reading our Junot.

La Casa Azul Bookstore has launched its "Barrio Book Club" and its first pick is none other than Penguin's own The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book club meeting date is fast approaching - Sunday, June 8th at 4pm - so if you're interested, visit La Casa Azul's Events Page for more information. The site asks that you send in an email to get the meeting location so act fast.

For those of you wondering, "What the heck's "el barrio?"...

In NYC, "el barrio" may refer to any neighborhood consisting primarily of Spanish-speaking residents, but the term is most often affectionately applied to the upper east side in Manhattan, especially between 103rd and about 116th streets. La Casa Azul Bookstore will not open its doors until the end of the year but if you have a chance to visit there's plenty of Latino culture to savor. You must FIRST have a cuchifrito - a deep fried food and not for the health conscious. My favorite is the "alcapurria" made of plantains and ground beef - SO yummy. Here's a pic so you know exactly what you're looking for.