Book Career
Vizzini's first published work was an essay he submitted to the New York Press, an alternative newspaper, about winning honorable mention at the 1996 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. As a freelance writer for the paper, he wrote about everything from family vacations to getting drunk in the street with dangerous urban youth. The success of Vizzini's work earned him an invitation to contribute a teen-focused article to the New York Times Magazine.
In May 1998, Vizzini's essay "Teen Angst? Nah!" appeared in the Times Magazine. Following this, several of his New York Press columns became the core of his first book, Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography, which was published when he was 19 years old. Vizzini attended Hunter College, located in Manhattan. In 2004 his first novel Be More Chill was published. A review for the New York Times Book Review said that Be More Chill, which is about a high school student named Jeremy Heere who gets a supercomputer pill in his brain that makes him cool, "is so accurate that it should come with a warning." Others have criticized the book for its language and lack of a clear moral. In 2006 Vizzini's second novel It's Kind of a Funny Story was published. It is based on Vizzini's five-day stay in Brooklyn's Methodist Hospital psychiatric ward. The book recounts fifteen-year-old Craig Gilner's battle with suicidal depression as a result of a taxing school year at Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School that exacerbates his feeling of social inadequacy. In 2012 Vizzini's third novel The Other Normals was published. The Other Normals is an "Alternative Fantasy" about a teenager who falls into a fantasy world that is the basis of his favorite role-playing game.
In 2013, House of Secrets, the first novel in a middle grade fantasy series by Vizzini and filmmaker Chris Columbus, was published. Entertainment Weekly gave House of Secrets an "A-" review.
Vizzini's characters and situations are said to be based upon his time spent at Stuyvesant.
Read more about this topic: Ned Vizzini
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