Blog
The Value of Uncertainty
“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”
— Pablo Picasso
Coming to Brookline
I will be appearing in Brookline, MA, on March 12 to celebrate the town’s community-wide read of Defending Jacob. I am really looking forward to this event, not just because the organizers have been so gracious, but because it is the town where I grew up and where my family lived for a long time. In fact, my parents met at Brookline High, where I will be speaking. Come join us if you can.
Hemingway: “Make it alive”
You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not just depict life — or criticize it — but to actually make it alive. So that when you read something by me you actually experience the thing.
Hemingway, age 25, letter to his father, March 1925
Quote of the Day
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.”
— William G.T. Shedd
Jeffrey Eugenides: Write Posthumously
To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place. When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember?
Jeffrey Eugenides’ speech to the winners of the 2012 Whiting Award — wonderful advice to young writers (and not-so-young writers) on the hazards of success. Well worth your time.
Louis C.K. on cell phones
Trade paperback pub day
Defending Jacob hits the shelves in trade paperback today. This is the larger paperback format that many readers and book clubs prefer.
It has been an eventful summer for the book. It was nominated for prizes as best crime novel, best legal novel, best thriller, and best mystery of 2012. These are, respectively, the Hammett, Harper Lee, ITW Thriller and (for best mystery) the Barry and Strand Critics awards — the last of which it won. (The Barry and Hammett Prizes will be awarded in the next few weeks.) It was also named a Massachusetts Must Read Book and nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award.
The book is also this month’s selection for the Target Book Club, for which I (happily) signed ten thousand books. Yes, you read that right: ten thousand. So we have high hopes there, as well.
If you’d like to buy the book in its handsome new edition, you’ll find links to all the online stores here. But, as always, I encourage you to buy from your local independent bookstore if you’re lucky enough to have one.