Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
    Unavailable
    The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
    Unavailable
    The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

    Written by Kristopher Jansma

    Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson" (The Village Voice) in this inventive and witty debut about a young man's quest to become a writer and the misadventures in life and love that take him around the globe-from the author of Why We Came to the City

    As early as he can remember, the narrator of this remarkable novel has wanted to become a writer. From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, Kristopher Jansma's hopelessly unreliable-yet hopelessly earnest-narrator will be haunted by the success of his greatest friend and literary rival, the brilliant Julian McGann, and endlessly enamored with Evelyn, the green-eyed girl who got away. A profound exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, this delightful picaresque tale heralds Jansma as a bold, new American voice.

    Editor's Note

    Slanted truths...

    Jansma’s debut is at once an homage to great fiction & a challenge to the limits of a reader’s suspension of disbelief. Never before have metafictive irony & an unreliable narrator been rendered so compulsively readable.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 21, 2013
    ISBN9781101605318
    Unavailable
    The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
    Author

    Kristopher Jansma

    Kristopher Jansma is a lecturer at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn. He is currently working on a new novel for Viking.

    Related to The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

    Related audiobooks

    Contemporary Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Most Anticipated: The Great Spring 2024 Preview

      Apr 2, 2024

      April April 2 Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall [F] For starters, excellent title. This debut short story collection from playwright Marshall spans sex bots and space colonists, wives and divorcées, prodding at the many meanings of womanhood.

      25 min read

    • Article

      Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalists 'Capture The Messiness Of Reality'

      Mar 5, 2018

      The award, which focuses on pressing social issues, has revealed its inaugural shortlist — including fiction by Jesmyn Ward, Zinzi Clemmons, Mohsin Hamid, Samrat Upadhyay and Lesley Nneka Arimah.

      2 min read

    • Article

      New Titles

      Oct 9, 2019

      By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narra-tive poem that moves with

      4 min read

    • Article

      New Titles

      Feb 13, 2019

      By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narrative poem that moves with

      4 min read

    • Article

      10 New Audiobooks for Fall 2023

      Oct 10, 2023

      Read aloud by masterful narrators and beloved authors, these 10 audiobooks stand out this season. (Don't believe us? Listen for yourself!) The post 10 New Audiobooks for Fall 2023 appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Schulz, Attenberg, Yanagihara, and More

      Jan 11, 2022

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Kathryn Schultz, Jami Attenberg, Hanya Yanagihara, and more—that are publishing this week. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Schulz, Attenberg, Yanagihara, and More appeared first on

      10 min read

    • Article

      May Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      May 2, 2023

      New books Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Emma Cline, Samantha Irby, Brandon Taylor, and more. The post May Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Best Films About Life On The Road

      Apr 20, 2021

      A trippy, freewheeling cult classic starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as two bikers traversing the wide open west. Stunning American vistas, a rocking soundtrack, a quintessential Sixties vibe and one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest supporting role

      1 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      May 19, 2021

      Great Read
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Gabbert, Manne, Marshall, and More

      Aug 11, 2020

      Our own Thomas Beckwith takes quick look at some notable books publishing this week. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Gabbert, Manne, Marshall, and More appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Month

      Feb 4, 2022

      The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid, translated by Yardenne Greenspan “This is where the illusion we call humankind was erased,” a guide to Holocaust sites tells the visitors on his tour. He is so steeped in its history that he has become corrupted b

      2 min read

    • Article

      New Titles

      Oct 10, 2018

      By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narrative poem that moves with

      9 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Saunders, Enríquez, Gurganus, and More

      Jan 12, 2021

      Here's a quick look at some notable books—new titles from George Saunders, Mariana Enríquez, Allan Gurganus, and more—that are publishing this week. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Saunders, Enríquez, Gurganus, and More appeared first on T

      9 min read

    • Article

      Letter Of The Week

      Mar 19, 2020

      I ENJOYED Catherine Austen’s “From the field” (5 March) and heartily endorse her appreciation of The Huntsman at the Gate. I have a copy dated 1953 and, over the past 60 years, have read it once every couple of years and every time it is fresh, thoug

      1 min read

    • Article

      Sharpshooters and Tall Tales: On John Larison’s ‘Whiskey When We’re Dry’

      Sep 11, 2018

      John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry speaks the American language of the tall tale: Its braggadocio is disguised as candor, and the novel mutes any trace of absurdity with its sharp plot, its tendency to whisper secrets rather than dwell on them, an

      4 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      May 19, 2021

      Great Read
      5 min read

    • Article

      Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2022 Book Preview

      Jan 13, 2022

      In this, our first preview for Pandemic Year Three, we offer up nearly 200 books, with the hope that they can, in some small measure, act as a balm, an escape, a distraction, a source of pleasure, a reason for hope, a source of light in the darkness.

      64 min read

    • Article

      March Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Mar 3, 2022

      This month, we've got our eye on new books from the likes of Elaine Hsieh Chou, Sarah Moss, Matt Bell, and Elena Ferrante. The post March Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      September Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Aug 29, 2023

      New books by Annie Ernaux, Naomi Klein Yiyun Li, Zadie Smith, C Pam Zhang, and more—here's what we can't wait to read this month. The post September Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      August Preview: The Millions Anticipated (This Month)

      Jul 31, 2023

      New books from Elizabeth Acevedo, Jamel Brinkley, Ann Patchett, Lydia Kiesling, and many more—here's what we can't wait to read this month. The post August Preview: The Millions Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    Reviews for The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

    4/5

    109 ratings19 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      "She pressed against me, half of her pressed up against just half of me. I half passed out." I'm in love with Sir Percival Glyde! (I'm only on page 20!)Evelyn is quite the muse. Julian and SPG are quite the odd couple. smacks of Fitz - Hemingway tumultuous relationship. Also the Evelyn character sits in the shadow of Lady Brett of The Sun Also Rises. Especially evident when she dismisses the Mitchell character, a thinly veiled jab at Michael Phillips. The story is a story wrapped in a story. telling the truth with a slant, as the protagonist is fond of repeating. Ad nauseam. Added bonus, NYC a backdrop and a Holden Caulfield feel to the main character, Pinkerton.
    • 4/5
      The first several chapters are great in this story about an aspiring writer who falls under the spell of a contemporary author he meets in a class. This relationship is the overarching subject in the book. Another major relationship for Julian is with a classical actress he meets through his author friend. The closing chapters are also quite good. However, in the middle are a series of short episodes and excerpts from books that these characters are supposed to be writing and these distract from the central greatness of the book. Mr Jansma has the chops to be a great writer and if you want to get on the ground floor -don't get distracted and read the book.
    • 3/5
      Why would I put it on my book-discussion shelf if I put it on my abandoned shelf? I could use a reason to try again. I really dove into this book and read non-stop and then I just tired of it.
    • 5/5
      [Advance digital copy provided by Penguin's First Flights program]

      Kristopher Jansma's debut novel is captivating through the end. It is a breathtaking ride through the world of metafiction and an extremely well thought out story.

      The theme of storytelling versus fiction reminds me of what some other authors has tried a hand at of late. Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son and Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth come immediately to mind. But what Jansma accomplishes here is the perfection of the theme. Every word, every lie culminates into a gorgeously rendered story.

      Jansma has thought about the subject from so many different angles. He's scoured the halls of literature and history and life in search of the meaning of lies. But the story doesn't become bogged down by all this introspection, in fact it buoys it. The protagonist's thoughts on fiction are what makes this work stand above all the others who tackled the same subject from a distance.

      And the details. The rich details that creep up again and again--from checker boards to artificial sweeteners--they are done so skillfully and meaningfully. The superbly woven story, the intricate details, the beautifully rendered sentences--Kristopher Jansma may very well be New Jersey's answer to David Mitchell.

      I will say that as I approached the end, as the stories became more and more fantastic, the book became harder to read. I don't think it's any fault of Jansma's, but rather a result of the expectations the book makes in the first half. The first half is rather straight forward, and then it begins to jump all over the board. It worked, and I loved it, but I could see how this would be difficult for some to follow and enjoy as I did.

      A masterful debut and an author I will follow. I only hope Jansma chooses to make a more prolific and enduring career than some of his characters have.
    • 4/5
      Received as an ARC.I knew from after reading only a couple of pages that I was going to fall in love with this book. And I did. I almost read all of it in one sitting, except it got extremely late and I had to get up early the next day. I was warned however. The first page of the ARC I received had a note from the Editor with a disclaimer.The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is essentially a book about writing a book. The narrator tells about his life in how he has written and the various books he wrote and then managed to lose. The first one when he was a young boy waiting in an airport terminal for his mother to finish from work as a flight attendant.Jansma writes (in terms used from the book) on a slant. He does not write fiction, but he does not write the truth. He writes the truth on a slant. The way he does it though is what makes this novel so great. He manages to make one feel as if they are standing next to the narrator looking at the scene unfold or they are in the mind of the person who is speaking.As mentioned before, I wanted to finish reading this novel in one sitting. It is an outstanding debut which most likely I will read again and again, merely because I enjoyed it so much.
    • 4/5
      I was fortunate to receive a copy of this book through the Penguin First Flights program. It is slated to be published in March 2013. " Tell all the truth but tell it slant" is what a professor tells our protagonist while he is busy trying to become a writer and it sets the tone for the whole novel. Debut novelist Kristopher Jansma must have used much of what he went through in school and in life becoming a novelist but what I wondered is if he himself has shed skin to become a new person as often as the main character of his book. The story takes us from his youth working in North Carolina art museum cafe rubbing elbows with the upper crust to Africa where he is chasing an elusive author pretending to be his grandson. The first layer is shed when his best friend shows himself to be a naturally brilliant writer. The second layer when he throws away the love of his life, an aspiring actress. The other layers come off easily and our novelist creates a new nom de plume to go with every manuscript and job change. He is as afraid of success as he is afraid of failure and this leads him to run away or pretend not to care. He runs away from every relationship - friends, manuscripts and women as he continues to shed layers globetrotting. You will find yourself rooting for his success and sympathetic to his failures and as the world is round hoping he will find his way home.
    • 4/5
      Run leopard run
    • 3/5
      writing itself is great but story was too choppy for my taste
    • 4/5
      I kind of wish I'd read this instead of listened to it, because it would've been helpful to flip back to previous pages/sections. This book is a shape-shifter, but fascinating because of it. The unreliable narrator, whose name changes frequently to suit various circumstances tells us early on that he wants to "tell the truth, but tell it Slant" after his freshman creative writing prof quotes Emily Dickinson. That leaves the reader wondering what of this fiction is "true"? We are warned though that the narrator aspires to be a writer, that he finds material in all the people and situations around him and that he lies effortlessly. At the heart of the story are the three books he has written but lost, the trio of his friendship/love affair with Julian/jeffrey/Anton, another aspiring writer and Evelyn, the unattainable successful NY actress whom he loves idealistically. There are repeating motifs of time and art and gold (his watch, a painting) and following this thread helps to connect some of the narrative that morphs with different worldwide locations and aliases. It telescopes into stories within stories -- and presents the challenge to remember which one is the "fiction." Very cleverly done, but if you don't like the "meta" approach or non-linear stories, not for you.
    • 3/5
      There were parts of this book that were amazing,as good as anything I've ever read. There were other parts that were tedious. The characters are not the most likeable, but then who is, if you really get to know them. That being said, you can't get to know these characters very well because they lie, pretend, and posture all the way through their lives. Which is kind of the point of the story.

      I will read more Kristopher Jansma.
    • 4/5
      The narrator - who claims to be the author - of this book describes his coming of age as a storyteller and writer. As a teenager, he learns the joys of pretending to be something he is not, and he channels that joy into his writing. He becomes close friends with his biggest competitor, who is also a writer. He has an on-again-off-again relationship with an actress. This book explores those relationships, but more than anything, it explores the narrator's on-again-off-again relationship with the truth. He is so busy making up stories about his own life that it is hard to tell what he believes and what he does not, and hard to tell how fictional the book is. The writing is delightful - the book is worth reading for the writing alone. The themes of truth and fiction become very meta, as a writer writes a novel about a writer inventing stories and perhaps believing them.
    • 5/5
      I like short-story-influenced novels, so I thought this was great......................And the story-within-a-story themes, the layers, it works. You can sorta try to puzzle over what’s “real” and what’s “imagination”.
    • 4/5
      The series of vignettes raises many questions while grappling with different versions of the truth and relationships among the three main characters. With unreliable narration moving forward in time, the plot is nonetheless anything but linear, as we watch what happens to the main character from the age of 8 at Terminal B at Raleigh's airport to New York to Africa, Iceland, Luxumbourg and full circle back to Terminal B.--or at least what we think happens.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this, though it was really all over the place. And there's the issue, when a young author is writing as a young author, of wondering how much of the style is the "author's" and how much is the author's. Parts of it were very good, and then parts got a little histrionic, and but since the story dealt with young histrionic types it mostly worked, though it had its exhausting moments. Ice fishing in upstate New York, Southern country clubs, the Grand Canyon, Sri Lanka, Africa... that's a lot of ground to cover.Jansma takes on an interesting meta kind of conceit, playing around with the idea of source material and truth-telling and how and what gets converted into fiction -- the book is set up as a series of tightly linked stories, or maybe they're really just chapters. Some of them work well and feel complete in their own right, some less so on both counts, but it was still pretty readable.
    • 4/5
      This book was very different from almost any other book I have read. At the very end I finally understood the publisher's note at the beginning of the book that states, "If you believe you are the author of this book, please contact Haslett & Grouse Publishers (New York, New York) at your first convenience.The writing is clever, funny, bold, and yet always leaves one wondering, what is fact and what if fiction?The story is basically about a young writer trying to reinvent himself. Along his journey, we met the people closest to him. Each chapter is set up about a small part of his life that reads like a story. This was an original, very engaging read.I received the book as part of the Goodreads giveaway program in exchange for a review.
    • 4/5
      In The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel, Jansma builds a story containing fictions upon fictions through an unreliable narrator and somehow ends up with a story about truth. The unnamed narrator is the ultimate con-artist/story-teller who is preoccupied with his own story to the detriment of all his relationships, but possibly finds some redemption in the end.Bromance, love story, adventure, meta-fiction all wrapped up in the unchangeable spots of a leopard.
    • 3/5
      Works of fiction about the fiction writer's struggle to find a voice and get words down on paper are more likely to find a sympathetic audience among other writers than among general readers, who may not care much about that particular struggle. Such a book is The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, the first novel by Kristopher Jansma. Jansma's narrator is indeed a fiction writer, one who starts his writing career early, to fill the time while awaiting the return of his mother from her job as an airline hostess. It is in the airline terminal where he writes, and loses, his first manuscript. But he is also, in broader terms, a creator—unreliable and shape-shifting and something of a charlatan—whose most noteworthy and audacious fictional creation might be his own life. We never learn this young man's name, instead following him through a series of adventures under various aliases and guises as he pursues his art, the lost love of his life, and his best friend, also a writer but a much more successful one. These adventures take place in various locales in the US, Africa and Europe. The novel is clever, playful and endlessly inventive, crammed with exotic settings and elaborate incident, peppered with references to other authors and literary works, and told with verve and self-deprecating humour. Throughout, Jansma’s narrator maintains an ironic distance, from both the reader and what’s happening on the page, as if to imply “all this happened but it is not necessarily true.” In the end, the book’s circular structure takes us back where we started, to the airline terminal, where, instead of a lost manuscript, a different manuscript is waiting to be found. The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, as the title suggests, is also a book about the fluid nature of identity and the ways in which we alter ourselves to accommodate shifting realities. The book is sometimes confusing. It is the antithesis of a straightforward narrative, and some readers may find its deliberate disjointedness frustrating. But it also entertains, at times grandly, in the cheeky, subversive and highly self-conscious manner of, say, a movie about making movies.
    • 5/5
      The unreliable narrator and writer of Kristopher Jansma’s The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards tells readers upfront that figuring out the reality of his life will mean reading between the lines of his dramatic and imaginatively penned stories. The result is a deeply moving exploration of love, friendship and the often confounding and counter intuitive nature of truth and storytelling.
    • 5/5
      Not all the leopards are metaphorical…Look, I won’t claim there aren’t disappointments, but after decades of selecting books for myself, I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what I’m going to like. And from the first time I heard even the briefest description of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, it was high on my must-read list. I mean, seriously, the title alone--somehow it just spoke to me. And I wasn’t disappointed.But the odd thing is, when I read the jacket copy, the part that I really honed in on was about the rivalry between the two writers. And while certainly that is an element of the novel’s plot (such as it is), that’s not the part that I should have been paying attention to. No, it was phrases like “search for identity,” “web of lies,” and “exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling” that are really at the crux of Kristopher Jansma’s exciting debut novel.Let’s back up… There have been some fantastic novels that blurred the lines between fact and fiction through a variety of narrative devices. In Life of Pi, Yann Martel opened the novel in direct address to readers, eventually becoming the character of The Writer. And when The Bridges of Madison County was published a few decades ago, so many readers wrote to the National Geographic believing the tale was true that they made a museum exhibit of the correspondence. I digress, but the opening of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards brought these examples to mind, because the first page after the table of contents says this: “If you believe that you are the author of this book, please contact Haslett & Grouse Publishers (New York, New York) at your first convenience.”Interesting. We move on, but that opening note is never quite forgotten. And this tale begins, again, in direct address to readers in the form of an author’s note. It launches, “I’ve lost every book I’ve ever written.” And the narrator tells the tale of that first loss. You will learn of others along the way. The last line, incidentally, of that author’s note is this: “These stories all are true, but only somewhere else.” And this coming after not one, not two, but three separate epigraphs on the nature of truth. Interesting. The novel’s first-person narrator seems earnest enough, but be prepared for sleight of hand—or whatever the literary equivalent might be. The storytelling here is unconventional, it’s meta-fictional, it’s challenging, it’s non-linear, it’s literary, and, oh yes, it is always interesting. Jansma’s characters are… Well, to be honest, they’re not all that likable when you get right down to it, but they’re well-drawn enough for familiarity to breed contempt. (And in the scheme of unlikable characters, these ones are not so unpleasant as to put you off from following their journey.) You’ll note that I did not describe them as “believable,” because there’s a heightened quality about the trio at the center of the tale, and the circumstances they find themselves in, as they chase and/or flee each other around the globe. Jansma isn’t trying to replicate reality. There is artifice throughout, and it’s very intentional.His writing is fantastic! It’s read-aloud, eminently quotable, just a pleasure to absorb. Everything about this novel is stylish, stylized, and sophisticated. It’s also very funny. It’s gonzo, romantic, clever, and the sort of book to remind readers and writers both why they do what they do. In short, this is an exhilarating debut novel. My instincts were right on this time. Score one for me.