Fact Sheet

Swimming Naked with Jellyfish
2009 Eric Hoffer Awards-Montaigne Medal Finalist Award
Thought Provoking Books and Excellence in Independent Publishing

View all my books on my Amazon Author Page: http://tinyurl.com/6z7t2ob

Title Swimming Naked with Jellyfish
Author: Shelley Gilbert
Contact: shelley@shelleyjoygilbert.com
Publisher: Shelley Gilbert
Category of Book: Fiction/Autobiographical Novel
Genre of Book: Coming Of Age
Edition Type: Trade Paperback
Where Selling: Amazon.com, Booksurge.com, and other sources
Selling on Amazon, Kindle, Ebay
Publication Date: August 2008
Page Count: 350
Word Count: 76,000
ISBN: 978-0-9718317-1-1  (ISBN 10: 0-9718317-1-8)

One Paragraph Synopsis
IRIS ANDREA confronts her grief over multiple loss of family by writing her memoir. She flashes back to growing up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, 1950s-60s, then fast forwards to an immediate presence of understanding. In her effort to discover her identity and self-worth, she digs up intense childhood anger for her beloved tyrant father, passive mother, jealous sister but she also finds love. Iris powerfully narrates her encounters with her violent father and rebellion against the trapped submissive females of her family by escaping with the uninhibited males. She discloses an insecure, sensual adolescence throbbing in the birth of Rock and Roll, all her firsts, her taste in men, shame and attempted suicide, failed marriage, great passion and tragedy. Iris realizes she’s always searching to fill the holes in her whole.

One Paragraph Author Bio
Shelley Gilbert spent 14 years writing her coming-of-age autobiographical novel, Swimming Naked with Jellyfish. This debut novel has received praise reviews from Little, Brown and Company, author Benjamin Cheever and others. She is currently writing the sequel. The author teaches Vignette Method, The Fast Track Memoir Writing Workshop, All Ages, the simple, sensible, doable method she developed while writing her novel. Her book won Finalist, The Montaigne Medal, Eric Hoffer Awards. Ms. Gilbert also teaches Information Gathering Labs on How to Self-Publish Fiction Books and How to Self-Publish Nonfiction Books. The author has also been a visual artist for over 30 years, She created and published her first book, the gift-quality coloring book for adults, Islands, A Coloring Book for Adults, selling on Amazon.com since 2002. This unique book contains 30 drawings and 30 poems by Ms. Gilbert. Her collage is award winning and her tape paintings showed in a Madison Avenue art gallery juried collection. Ms. Gilbert was born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY and graduated from SUNY Empire State College, NY with her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. She lives in New York with her husband, Hank Teller.

Some Praise Reviews
“Shelley Gilbert’s prose is wonderfully vivid and straightforward…the writing is compelling…and though the story confronts rather grave issues, Iris’s witty, accessible tone makes an ideal balance that encourages readers to keep the pages turning.”
Little, Brown and Company
                                                                                                      (Michael Pietsch recommended)

“Shelley Gilbert is a wonderful writer. She’s brave, intelligent and it’s clear that she takes great pleasure in the language. This is good work. Sometimes even dazzling.”
                                                                                                                               Benjamin Cheever
                                        Author,Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete

“Shelley Gilbert has written an autobiographical novel. She has a fresh new voice, at times edgy, at times confiding…seductive, but always confident…as a reader you feel you are in good hands. The emotional range of Ms. Gilbert’s novel is very broad–intense childhood anger, adolescent insecurity, passion, grief and rebellion, pride. It is not a serene book. The winds of feeling start howling in the first chapter and hardly subside. But the narrator’s voice can control the passion, too–becomes stronger, in fact, as the temperature rises. It is a full-fledged, powerful novel, a deadly serious account of one woman’s effort to discover and maintain her identity, her sense of self and self-worth, despite an upsetting childhood and an adolescence ending in tragedy.”  James H. Case, Dean (Retired), SUNY Empire State College, NY

“The best piece of writing on orgasm I have ever in my life read. It’s hard to write a great sex scene. It was raw, quirky, individual, original, impossible to forget, and contains the best description of the experience of having an orgasm.”  Susan Grossman, Editor