![]() "But the danger of using vernacular is it's a lot more fun to write than to read. "Vernacular is a way to communicate a lot in voice without exposition-Todd is smart, but no one's ever had a chance to show him how to write," Ness says. "The idea was that the world is already a pretty noisy place," Ness says via telephone from his home in Bromley, on the outskirts of London, "with cellphones, texts, the Internet, but I didn't start writing until I had an idea for Todd's voice, and it emerged slowly." Todd has been called science fiction's Huck Finn, with his endearing naïveté and creative vernacular, a sort of pidgin English that Ness says he struggled with initially. Ness subsequently produced three thick books in three years (the second volume, The Ask and the Answer, was published in 2009), though he'd been thinking about "Noise" for several years before he figured out a shape for the story. ![]() ![]() I bought the trilogy on the strength of that." "I rang up the agent, but there was no more to read. It was a unique voice, and so imaginative," Johnstone-Burt recalls. ![]() ![]() "I read just the first 40 pages or so, up the point where says, ‘It's a girl,' and I just thought it was brilliant. Ness, an American living in London, had published an adult novel and a short story collection when his agent, Michelle Kass, approached Denise Johnstone-Burt, publisher of Walker Books, in 2007 with the beginning of what would become Knife. ![]()
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