"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 as early as he can remember, the hopelessly unreliable—yet hopelessly earnest—narrator of this ambitious debut novel has wanted to become a writer. From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, Kristopher Jansma’s irresistible narrator will be inspired and haunted by the success of his greatest friend and rival in writing, the eccentric and brilliantly talented Julian McGann, and endlessly enamored with Julian’s enchanting friend, Evelyn, the green-eyed girl who got away. After the trio has a disastrous falling out, desperate to tell the truth in his writing and to figure out who he really is, Jansma’s narrator finds himself caught in a never-ending web of lies. As much a story about a young man and his friends trying to make their way in the world as a profoundly affecting exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards will appeal to readers of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad with its elegantly constructed exploration of the stories we tell to find out who we really are. *Starred Review* Online columnist Jansma performs a veritable circus act here, cramming his first novel with literary allusions until its like a small car stuffed with clowns, who then first burst forth to cavort and turn balloons into poodles. This canny, seductive, and utterly transfixing tale about the magic of storytelling and the misery of writing is told by an itinerant, chameleonic writer who calls himself Nobody. The fatherless son of a flight attendant, he relies on and cares for his rich, gay, and unstable best friend, who turns out to be a truly gifted novelist, and falls hopelessly in love with an actress so beautiful that princes propose marriage. Like a magician pulling a seemingly endless string of colorful scarves from a hat, Jansma streams stories-within-stories-within-stories, each a diabolically clever homage. As Nobody juggles false identities and survives near-catastrophes in New York, Las Vegas, Iceland, Luxembourg, Dubai, Ghana, and Sri Lanka, readers will detect riffs on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Truman Capote, Bob Dylan, Tolstoy, Salinger, Borges, Kipling, and many more. To add to the droll, romantic, and boldly creative sorcery of it all, Jansma riffs on plagiarism as “the new American art form” and ponders the paradoxes of literary fame. A first novel with the strength and agility of a great cat leaping through rings of fire. --Donna Seaman "At times, the novel is a string of short stories; at others, it is a set of matroyshka dolls, containing, at one point, a novel within a short story wihthin a novella within a novel. ...Jansma approaches them with wry humor and a steady hand. The narrator's games never fail to entertain, even if he is constantly changing the rules." --The New Yorker “[A] tricky picaresque thick with literary allusion from Fitzgerald to Amis…[A] clever, tightly paced novel of ever-upping stakes.”  —Vogue.com "Playfully weird...I'd call this book "postmodern," but that makes it sound like it's not as pleasurable to read as it is."— Meg Wolitzer , author of the New York Times bestselling The Interestings on NPR.com “Though one might recognize bits of Dickens, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, this is simply a good case of stealing from geniuses. It’s a breathless work the celebrates the literary tradition, while making a strong case that its author belongs on the shelf beside his forebears.” —Time Out New York (5 Stars) “Couched in Jansma’s wildly recursive funhouse of a novel is a coming-of-age story…filled with clever literary allusions and insider jokes…[T]here’s plenty to relish in this noteworthy debut.” —Heller McAlpin for NPR.org “F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson…[T]he novel strikes a cord on questions of authenticity, love, and ambition, and it reminds us that life is often out of our control, even if we’re writing it down.” —The Village Voice “One of the best books of the year.” —Jeff Glor for CBS Author Talk “[Jansma is] a writer of extreme promise, who seems to belong to an older generation.” —Electric Literature “Recommended Reading” “[A] slippery and energetic debut novel…rapid in pace, the language and details tightly controlled…It’s tremendous fun, this book.” —San Francisco Journal of Books “[T]his mind-blowing spiral of a book will also appeal to anyone who enjoys their fiction as playful as it is intriguing.” —Book Reporter “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards’ intricate narrative game and its carbon-burning escapades add up to a novel that is wise about identity and aspiration, competitive storytelling, romantic obsession and the assertion that ‘all these stories are true, only somewhere else.’”