Seattle Novelist (And Seattlest Friend) Generating Buzz With First Book

Pauls Toutonghi, a product of the Seattle Public School system who now lives in Brooklyn, is in town to publicize his first novel, Red Weather. Random House is the publisher--and, as our friend Jason McDonald says, don't be fooled by the name--they don't publish just anything.

Red Weather is the story of teenage boy, the son of immigrants, who's navigating his first romance, his father's drunkenness, and a house crammed with visitors from the home country. It succeeds in two ways--first, in being funny, a quality missing from far too many novels, and second, in capturing the pure awkwardness of the hormone-infused teenager.

Like his protagonist, Pauls is the son of immigrants--an Egyptian father and a Latvian mother. He grew up in Lake City. His Seattle schools experience culminated in a degree from Garfield High. He attended Middlebury College and earned an M.F.A./Ph.D from Cornell. But he would give it all up for one at bat in professional baseball.

Full disclosure: Seattlest and Pauls have been friends for practically our whole lives. So maybe we're biased. But the Seattle Times and Time Out New York aren't, and they've both reviewed the book favorably. Booklist calls it "a first novel of uncommon poise and power."

Pauls reads from Red Weather Saturday afternoon at 4pm at Elliott Bay Books. It's a Seattle Times staff pick!