"Andrew Smith (Winger; Grasshopper Jungle) pens a phenomenal novel about life's many detours, told in the unforgettable voice of an epileptic teenager with heterochromatic eyes (one blue, one green) and a strange history. When 16-year-old Finn Easton was seven years old, a dead horse that was being transported to a rendering plant fell "one hundred sideways miles" off a bridge and landed on Finn and his mother. The impact broke Finn's back and killed his mother. His epilepsy, which he may grow out of, is a "souvenir" of the accident, and if he does grow out of it, he suspects he may miss the way the seizures empty the words out of his head. Finn measures the world in miles instead of minutes, because he believes "distance is more important than time." His crush, Julia Bishop, a Chicago transplant living with her aunt and uncle because of a devastating secret, admires Finn's perspective on life. The moment he meets Julia, Finn wonders "how many atoms from the same calamities out there in the universe our body shared.... Maybe my right hand and her left hand both came from the same supernova." Julia, ever astute, gets why Finn named his dog Laika, is patient with him during his wild mood swings when he's returning from a "blank out" (seizure) and, most importantly, she loves Finn back. Which makes it crushing for both Finn (and readers) when Julia must return to Chicago--the very place where she was victim of a tragedy that makes Finn wish he "could push the world back all those miles with my bare hands and make it change direction," even if it means they'd never have met. Throughout the novel, Finn suffers from an identity crisis as he questions whether or not he's the product of his father's bestselling cult-classic novel, The Lazarus Door, starring a protagonist with the teen's name, heterochromatic eyes, seizures, and scars identical to the ones he has on his back from his post-accident surgery. So Finn sets out on a road trip with his best friend, the memorable Cade Hernandez, to figure out the ending to his story, when an unexpected accident rewrites their future. Smith's sly commentary on today's school system ("designed to make us all the same," in Cade's words) intertwines with the story of Finn's desperation to break out and be different--not a reproduction of anyone's expectations. The well-rounded supporting characters and the Southern California setting make for a welcome departure from the usual glitz of Los Angeles life. Hilarious and wise, 100 Sideways Miles is an addictive and panoramic read about the intersecting--and divergent--paths that lie ahead. Breathtakingly good."

"Just like we had a group of friends in Toulouse, we had a group of friends in Chicago, with everybody playing in each other's bands, and really we found a family there. Those were wonderful years, but since then a lot of people have moved to LA, or just moved out. Sam I believe still lives in Chicago. I don't know if he's still making music. I sure hope so. He moved away from this type of music to buying analogue electronic machines and playing around with those a lot and it was divine, but he'd moved away from the pop format the last time I heard him. But I do love Sam Prekop, and I probably have even more of a soft spot for his solo albums than for his work with The Sea And Cake, which I also find superb, but the solo stuff has always touched me more somehow. Maybe it's because there's less at stake. Maybe they're more free and therefore more direct. You don't have to show off your prowess so much, I don't know. But I do like the freedom of them. It's like laughter, the way it comes out. I really like that. I find that in beautiful, well-crafted songs we approach perfection. Not that we should seek perfection necessarily; we're perfect as we are. But for me, artistically and aesthetically, we're coming close to something quite perfect, and therefore it makes it into my list. The album feels so lightly or deeply attuned that you don't have to force it down. You don't force it, you just let it be and follow it. You let it guide you, and that's a big quality to Sam's writing. Sam could probably have been a much bigger star in terms of having more fans, but I think he's probably always protected himself from that, knowing very well it would probably destroy his muse. It's very difficult to not get crushed by too much popularity. You want to please people and meet their expectations, and expectations are just the worst thing. They're the worst poison. They should be absolutely prohibited and fought against, actively. I sense that also: that people when they meet me have expectations. They have a whole story in their mind and then when they meet me and I'm just me it's somehow ah, I'm not what you expected me to be. But that's a trap, the expectation, and I try to avoid it. I try to not have expectations, because most of the time you're going to be disappointed. So why live a life of disappointment, when you can live a life of joy?"