Sometimes a second or a third novel does not come close to being as good as the first, as with Alice Sebold's blockbuster, "The Lovely Bones," whose second novel, "The Almost Moon" was a critical failure.

Scibona is convinced the experience of writing a second novel would be different for him, because his first book "has a lot of weird strictures in it and was set in an older era. I don't know what it feels like to write in the present, the world I know first hand. I think it will be so different from the first that it might even seem like a first novel."

Scibona relies heavily on his imagination rather than his own life, so he has trained himself to listen to other people, "the way they talk, what happens to them. I tend to record in my mind the stories older people tell. I grew up close to grandparents, who are all dead now. These people, who were first-generation immigrants, had experiences burnished by time. They were so grateful for everything they had."

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