Blog
The backlist is back
The success of Defending Jacob — now in its 17th week on the Times bestseller list, at #23 for ebooks, #24 for hardcovers, among the longest runs on either list — has had a nice byproduct: there is renewed interest in my two earlier books, Mission Flats and The Strangler. Both are being reissued in the U.S. today as trade paperbacks (the larger paperback size) with lovely new covers. The new covers, I think, are truer to the books than the original designs. I particularly like the new Mission Flats cover. If you’re interested in buying either book online, the links are here for Mission Flats and here for The Strangler. Better yet, go to your local independent bookstore.
All good news. There seems to be no other kind lately, for which I am very, very grateful. Thank you. Truly, to all the people who have made Defending Jacob such a roaring success — the many hundreds of thousands who have bought it, read it, passed it around, talked it up, discussed it in book clubs, sent me such kind messages — thank you. It’s been a great run and there’s no end in sight, with the paperback edition still to come and (fingers crossed, if we’re lucky, don’t want to jinx anything, but maybe, just maybe…) the movie. Stay tuned.
Bradbury: Action is hope
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad — you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
Still lifes by Christopher Stott, cont’d
Christopher Stott
“Inner Conflicts”
24” x 48” Oil on canvas, 2012
Giamatti on baseball
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
Fenway ’56
August 7, 1956. 68 cents + 7 cents tax. Via Eephus League.
Ken Burns: On Story
Into the Woods
A blog post I did for Random House over on Tumblr:
Into the Woods
Does it help to see where a novel is set? Would you understand Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County any better if you actually visited his Mississippi? Is it even possible to understand Dickens if you have no idea what Victorian London looked like?
I’m not sure there is a good answer. Sometimes the vision in the your mind’s eye is more vivid than any mere reality. Real life can be so disappointing. Remember when, a few months ago, the mansion said to have inspired Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was to be leveled? To me, the most compelling part of that story was how disappointing the mansion actually was — how unworthy of Jay Gatsby. Even the famous lawn, now turned weedy, was disappointing. Clearly the lawn in the news photos never “started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.” Of course, no lawn ever did that — and maybe that’s the point. Great fiction always outruns reality.
Still, people who read my novel Defending Jacob always ask me which details from the book are real. We want to know, we readers, just where the border between reality and fiction lies. In the novel, a teenage boy is murdered in Cold Spring Park, in Newton, Massachusetts. As it happens, both the park and the town are very real. I live in Newton and jog through Cold Spring Park all the time, as does the Barber family of my novel.
So, for the curious out there, here is a photo of the park, which I took just a couple of days ago, on May 10 — very near the date of the murder in the book (April 12), so this is roughly what the park would have looked like on the day of the crime, lush and green and muddy with the spring melt. If you’re curious, more pictures of Cold Spring Park are here.
The post includes this photo of Cold Spring Park, the setting of the murder in Defending Jacob.