Episode 49: Janelle Brown: I’ve been wanting Janelle on the program for some time, but the release of her fourth book, Pretty Things, felt like the right time considering Nicole Kidman optioned the book for an Amazon Prime series. But this is her second writing act. Before she was a best selling novelist, she was one of the most important voices in technology journalism.
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Her writing at Wired.com and Salon.com helped legitimize long-form writing on the Web during the dotcom era.
Then she left that world behind to become a novelist. But she continues to use Silicon Valley and start-up culture as the backdrop to her stories. What F. Scott Fitzgerald was to the West Egg, Janelle is to Silicon Valley culture.
She’s also the co-founder of Suite 8, a writing collective in Silver Lake, California, which had a very start-up like beginning!
About Janelle Brown
Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, This Is Where We Live, and Pretty Things, available soon from Random House.
Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Wired, Self, RealSimple, Lenny, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. Previously, she worked as a senior writer at Salon, and began her career as a staff writer at Wired during the dotcom boom years, working on seminal Web sites like HotWired and Wired News. In the 1990s, she was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women’s pop culture Webzine.
A native of San Francisco and graduate of UC Berkeley, she has since defected to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband Greg and their two children
[…] I interviewed Janelle for The Downtown Writers Jam podcast, we hatched a little book club idea. Gather up fifteen people who have read the book and put […]
[…] I interviewed Janelle for The Downtown Writers Jam podcast, we hatched a little book club idea. Gather up fifteen people who have read the book and put […]