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Where Awesome Book Readers Meet Awesome Writers

1. The Robinsons’ Dark Matter
   A technology lover from a very young age, Michael Raymond's first computer was a VIC-20. All the way back in 1982 his father managed to learn the lesson that if a cool piece of tech was on sale, it was probably outdated. Within a couple of weeks the VIC-20 was exchanged for a Commodore 64 and it was on that machine that Michael fell in love with programming in BASIC, and eventually found himself coding in assembly. Years before that first (and second) computer, Michael had been introduced to the Berenstein Bears, the collective works of Richard Scarry, and many other fantastic children's books. He loved to discover interesting characters and see what adventures befell them. Most of all, he loved to learn about the wide world outside through the fictional lives of those characters on the page. Michael's worlds of technology and books came together for the first time when he discovered the game "Below the Root," which stems from the fantastic Green Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The game had deceiving emotional depth to its story and incredible, original gameplay considering the limitations of the Commodore 64 platform it was coded for. It planted a seed in his mind. He wanted to be able to give the experience he'd just had to others--to create characters and worlds that would make people laugh, and cry...and think.
2. The Secret Life of Objects
   Dawn Raffel's illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, was published in June and was on Oprah's Summer Reading List and Best Memoir List for 2012. She is also the author of two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division (which has been reissued as an e book)—and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania. She is now Editor at Large at Reader's Digest and the editor of The Literarian at the Center for Fiction.