Looking For Alaska

John Green, you might know, is the award-winning number one bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed.

John Green, you might know, is the award-winning number one bestselling author of books, including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles all the way down, and The Anthropocene reviewed.

Some of the other top books parents have worked to pull from schools are titled Lawn Boy, My Friend Dahmer, Out of Darkness, In the Dream House, The Hate You Give, Flamer, Looking for Alaska, Hopeless, The Handmaid's Tale, a picture book called Dim Sum for Everyone.

There's a line in my first novel, Looking for Alaska, that something like, I hate sports and I hate people who play or support or participate in any way in the sports industrial complex.

But I have to assume that, I mean, you were working on it. Tell me how you got the confidence to start writing your own book?

I think what gave me that confidence was working at a magazine that reviewed 400 books every two weeks.

And I said, I'd really like to write a book about a kid at a boarding school who's grappling with guilt and grief. And she said, that sounds great, but you have to write it.

And to her immense credit, she read it. And she said, you know, there's something here.

Of the 40 single-spaced pages Eileen read, I think probably, I don't know, six or seven sentences from that are in Looking for Alaska.

Genderqueer, All Boys Aren't Blue, The Bluest Eye, Flamer, Looking for Alaska, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Lawn Boy, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Out of Darkness, A Court of Mist and Fury, Crank, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and This Book is Gay.

Alaska tracks life stories from hunters, fishermen, and trappers of Alaska by Randy Zarnkey. It's oral histories.

I hunted eagles for bounty years ago. If you tell people that now they think you're a really bad person. We got two bucks a piece for eagles.

The biggest day I had was during a Herring run. The eagles were eating the Herring and I killed 33 eagles. The only reason I didn't get more was I run out of bullets.

We finished up the air base on a net Island in record time. One day, this is during world war II. One day a patrol came back and one of the planes was doing victory rolls over the field.

When he landed, he said he got a submarine. He told his commanding officer where it was. They sent a patrol boat out and came back with about 300 pounds of whale blubber. So they immediately had a whale recognition class. That's the illusion theater in world war II.