The author, on how Codex got her name:It was important to me that my dog’s name not be common or overtly feminine. I can’t remember what made me first think of “Codex,” but it was some bookish word on a list somewhere. I was thinking it might be a fun name, and loved the literary connection (codices were the first bound manuscripts) but wasn’t sure the word was name-y enough until I remembered a web series called The Guild, in which a character’s gaming alter ego is named Codex. At that point, I was like: It is a name! And Codex has many aliases....[read on]About Oliva's new novel, The Last One, from the publisher:
Survival is the name of the game as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself in Alexandra Oliva’s fast-paced novel of suspense.Visit Alexandra Oliva's website.
She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far.
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young womanthe show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes.
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
Sophisticated and provocative, The Last One is a novel that forces us to confront the role that media plays in our perception of what is real: how readily we cast our judgments, how easily we are manipulated.
The Page 69 Test: The Last One.
Coffee with a Canine: Alexandra Oliva & Codex.
--Marshal Zeringue