It's Passover, it's Easter, it's my uncle's birthday, it's my nephew's birthday. A lot of celebrating going on. Also, check out Carrie Runnals's author interview website, Words to Mouth. I did a Podcast with her last week....
I'll be reading tonight at The Spoken Interludes Reading Series with John Burnham Schwartz and David Ebershoff.
I've been talking to a lot of book clubs (in person, by phone, and online) that have been discussing Matrimony and I've started in the last few months to do a monthly guest blog over at the Reading Group Guides blog at Book Reporter.
Hi, everyone. I wanted to let you know about a MATRIMONY book group offer that Vintage is sponsoring. Sign up by midnight September 21 and Vintage will set up a chat with me and your book group to discuss MATRIMONY. Although the program generally involves a drawing such that only five book groups win, I have agreed to talk with all the book groups that sign up. Here's the link for doing so:
I write this from a Sheraton in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I'm making a pit stop before the next reading on my paperback book tour. Last night I was at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida. Books and Books, for those of you who don't know it, is one of the truly great independent bookstores out there.
Thanks to Google Alerts, I get a daily email listing the previous day's blogs in which my name appears. Now, Joshua Henkin is not a particularly common name (though there are three of us on Facebook), but I have always been dimly aware of a doppelganger. An athlete, no less (a wrestler?), who competed in the Macabi Games in Israel.
I hope everyone had a good Labor Day weekend (Isn't Labor Day a misnomer? You don't work on Labor Day. It's only once Labor Day's over that you start to work). Lots of stuff coming up, including some Joshua Henkin guest blogging this week: at Booksquare tomorrow, Wednesday, followed by more guest blogging at The Elegant Variation on Thursday, followed by a drawing for some free signed copies of MATRIMONY on Friday, also at the Elegant Variation. So check early and often.
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to my blog, which was on hiatus in recent months because life was calling, but which has now returned, bigger and stronger, kinder and gentler. The paperback of MATRIMONY is now out, with a spanking new cover, which is generating strong feeling--some people love it, some people hate it, which is what a writer wants: just as long as people take notice. Speaking of the cover, there's an interesting contest going on over at A Reader's Journal.
It's tax day! Here's to hoping there are lots of taxes to be paid next year on book revenues (I need to keep myself off the streets!) In the meantime, reviews, reviews, reviews. It's late, true, but this is certainly a case of better late than never, when it comes from Carlin Romano, the Philadelphia Inquirer book critic and former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and it's as big a rave as this is.
Now that my book tour is over and I'm back to some semblance of normal life, one of the things that I've been doing a lot of is visiting book groups that have been discussing MATRIMONY.
Some really nice news: MATRIMONY was just named one of the Top 100 Books of 2007 by the New York Times. For the complete list, see the December 2 issue of the New York Times Book Review. And check in next week, when I'll be starting to blog again much more regularly. Really. I promise.
I'm back after a long hiatus, thanks to a very long book tour. Things are settling down (sort of), so this blog should start to hear from me more regularly soon. In the meantime, though, I wanted to let you know that I'm the guest blogger all day today on the Elegant Variation. I hope you'll log on and participate in the discussion.
http://www.marksarvas.blogs.com
I've started my book tour and it's a whirlwind. If it's Sunday, it must be Madison. I'm in Chicago tonight, Manhattan tomorrow night, Brooklyn on Wednesday night, and Cambridge on Thursday night. I'll blog more about the tour in upcoming days, and if you want to see me when I'm in town, look up the tour under "Events." For now, though, I want to mention some good news.
In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about my freshman year at college, and how that was the inspiration for Matrimony, though I said I changed many of the details. But which details, and why? What's the role of autobiography in fiction?
It's official! Publication date has arrived! Get your party hats and streamers and pop the champagne corks. Go out to the bookstore and buy a copy. Buy another for a friend. But two, while you're at it. The holidays aren't that far off. Buzz has been great thus far. Matrimony has been selected as a Booksense pick for October and a Borders Original Voices pick. Michael Cunningham calls Matrimony "a beautiful book." The Washington Post this past Sunday called it "truly an up-all-night read." There have been great write-ups already in Vanity Fair, GQ, and the Phildelphia Inquirer; the L.A. Times is reviewing it this coming Sunday, and there's lots more to come...
By the end of Matrimony, my two main characters, Julian and Mia, are in their late thirties and have just had a baby, but in some way for me the heart of the book--at least the inspiration for it--comes when they're much younger, when they're eighteen and freshmen in college.
I'm blogging again after a hiatus caused by the start of school and by the Jewish holidays. I had my first event last night, though it's still a couple of weeks before the publication of MATRIMONY, and it wasn't a reading but a panel.
More thoughts about the teaching of writing as the school year begins. If you ask anyone who has been in a writing workshop--and there are millions of such people now--what the main lesson they learned is, they will say, "Show, don't tell." This is unfortunate because "show, don't tell" is a lie.
As August comes to a close, I'm inaugurating my blog. It's less than six weeks before the publication date for MATRIMONY, and I'm very busy with preparations for that, but the school year is also impending--in fact, it has already begun at Brooklyn College's MFA program and is about to begin at Sarah Lawrence's MFA program, the two places where I teach--and I have to admit that I'm getting my usual feeling of looking forward to a new class, which I know a lot of people will think is crazy, but it's what happens to me every August. I've been thinking a lot about the teaching of writing, in part because I recently wrote an essay called "In Defense of the MFA," which will appear in the November/December issue of Poets and Writers.
