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The bags are packed. The Jeep is gassed. The road is waiting.
Early Monday morning, I will set out on a driving tour of bookstores in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, signing copies of Brave Deeds and, at various locations, reading from the novel during evening events. I’m looking forward to meeting readers on the road.
Let me rephrase that: I’m looking forward to meeting readers at the bookstore events. Good gracious, I hope they’re not standing on the road, despite the reliability of my new Jeep’s brakes.
My publicist and I are still working on future events--and I’ll add the new dates and events as they come up--but for now, click the link below to see where I’ll be in the next two weeks...
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This week’s contest is for Cruel Beautiful World by Caroline Leavitt: 16-year-old Lucy Gold is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister. Cruel Beautiful World examines the intricate, infinitesimal distance between seduction and love, loyalty and duty, chaos and control, as it explores what happens when you’re responsible for things you cannot make right. Set against a backdrop of peace, love, and the Manson murders, the novel reflects the era: exuberant, defiant, and precarious.
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Would you like to get a signed copy of the new novel? I’m pleased to announce that I am once again partnering with one of my favorite local bookstores, Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana, to make signed copies available to readers. Click the link below to find out how to go about ordering a signed copy of Brave Deeds (or Fobbit) from Country Bookshelf.
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My first published novel—The Standard Grand, released earlier this year from St. Martin’s Press—is the fourth book I’ve finished. I started my first one as an obscenely naïve undergrad. A couple years later, in grad school and no less naïve, I wrestled it to something resembling completion. I spent a year or more trying, and failing, to get an agent—any agent—interested in it. When that didn’t work, I started the next novel.
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The Washington Post gave some nice ink to Brave Deeds this week. Here's an excerpt from the review:
Brave Deeds takes place on a single afternoon, a five-hour sprint across enemy territory....A rule of thumb in modern moviemaking says that the first step in creating dramatic tension is to take away every character’s cellphone, so they get lost and can’t call for help. Abrams uses a similar convention, stripping the squad of their vehicle, medic, radio and map in the first chapter. Over the course of their journey across Baghdad, there are shootouts and pee breaks, tragedies and victories, and a lunch stop for halal chicken that made my stomach rumble in anticipation.
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I look forward to a new Josh Weil book like Donald Trump looks forward to a 2 a.m. Tweet (though my anticipation is decidedly less malicious in intent). Weil burrows deep into his characters and, like the cleverest of spiders, draws me closer and closer to the center, where I die in ecstasy. And now comes this new book of stories, The Age of Perpetual Light. From the title to the cover design to the story about an Amish woman discovering the wonders of electricity, light—both manmade and divine—guides us forward into this brilliant fiction.
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The question has always been this: can I fit all the books in the house?
The answer has always been: no.
Growing up, my parents purchased sleek wooden bookcases made in Scandinavia and filled them with volume after volume. Avid readers, they accumulated thousands of books before they retired to the South and downsized both house and library. Yet their house never looked stuffed to spilling. Their books always looked beautifully cared for. Tended. The titles that overflowed the shelves onto end tables and chairs looked loved, the others remaining bright and orderly on their shelves.
Until recently, I’d never settled long enough to tend my shelves.
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There will be blood. Oh yes, buckets and freshets and rivers of blood. Sniff the first pages of Sarah Schmidt’s debut novel See What I Have Done and you’ll catch the unmistakable odor of musky iron, damp earth, and old pennies (or, considering the book is about Lizzie Borden, bad pennies).... Beyond rendering blood into poetry, this is a riveting portrait of a mind gripped by madness. What happened in that family home back in 1892 to bring about such personal and deliberate horror from the blade of an axe?
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