Episode 372 - Danielle Anne Trussoni and A.J. Jacobs

Little Known Facts with Ilana Levine

Danielle Anne Trussoni is a New York Times,[1] USA Today,[2] and Sunday Times Top 10 bestselling novelist. She has been a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction jurist,[3] and wrote the "Dark Matters" column for the New York Times Book Review for five years, from 2018-2023. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. Her novels have been translated into 33 languages.

Her work includes six books: Falling Through the Earth (2006), Angelology (2010), Angelopolis (2012), The Fortress (2016), The Ancestor (2020), and The Puzzle Master (2023). The Puzzle Box is forthcoming in 2024. She is the recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Society of America award, the Dana Award in the novel, and The New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year[4] for her first book. In addition to being published in The New York Times Book Review, she has also been published in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, and Tin House. Her writings have been widely anthologized.

A.J. Jacobs is an author, journalist, lecturer and human guinea pig. He has written four New York Times bestsellers that combine memoir, science, humor and a dash of self-help.

His latest book is called The Puzzler.

His first book is called The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (Simon & Schuster, 2004). The memoir spent two months on the New York Times bestseller list.

After trying to improve his mind, he turned to his spirit. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007) tells of his attempt to follow the hundreds of rules in the Good Book. It spent three months on the NYT bestseller list, and was praised by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and others. It appeared on the cover of the evangelical magazine Relevant, but was also featured in Penthouse. (Jacobs is proud to be a uniter, not a divider).

In 2012, Jacobs completed his mind-spirit-body self-improvement trinity with Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. It is the tale of his quest to be as healthy as humanly possible for which he revamped his diet, exercise regimen, sleep schedule, sex life, posture and more. He wrote the book on a treadmill desk (It took him about 1,200 miles).

He also published a collection of essays called My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself (2010). The book contains experiments featuring George Washington’s rules of life, marital harmony, marital disharmony, multitasking and nudity – not in that order. It includes the Esquire piece ‘My Outsourced Life,’ which also appeared in Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek.

Jacobs’s new book It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree.” It’s about the extraordinary changes happening in family research and DNA, and how they have an impact on politics, race relations, health and happiness. The book has been praised by Kirkus (“delightful”), Booklist (“a real treat”) and Publisher’s Weekly (“entertaining and lively.”)

In addition to his books, Jacobs written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, New York magazine and Dental Economics magazine, one of the top five magazines about the financial side of tooth care.

He has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, The Dr. Oz Show, Conan and The Colbert Report.

He has given several TED talks, including ones about living biblically, creating a one-world family, and living healthily.

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