"The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem," says Rob Gordon, record store manager and lovesick audiophile in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Former Charlottesville resident and writer Rob Sheffield shares more than a name with the other Rob; in January, Sheffield released Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, a memoir that covers Sheffield’s life as a grad student at UVA and end of his marriage when his wife, Renée Crist (a former DJ at WTJU who also wrote for C-VILLE), died of a pulmonary embolism. Sheffield’s wrenching recount of her death and his life before and after won great reviews from the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, where Sheffield is a contributing editor and writes the wickedly humorous "Pop Life" column. And now Sheffield is headed back to his old stomping grounds—where he saw Pavement at Tokyo Rose and hung out with Crist in the parking lot of Fashion Square Mall listening to Nirvana—to read and sign his book at the New Dominion Bookshop on January 22, according to a press release from Random House imprint Three Rivers Press. Grab a copy and make plans to geek out over Sleater-Kinney and Otis Redding now!
Read C-VILLE’s article on Love is a Mixtape here.
Previous "This Just In" articles from this week:
Long an All-American [December 12]
Wanted: One large trophy case
Jefferson’s descendants killed, wounded in Colorado shootings [December 12]
David Works has tried to reach across the racial divide of TJ’s legacy
Squirrel shuts down Charlottesville [December 11]
Little critter gets fried
