David Abrams's Blog, page 167

Fobbit is a semi-finalist for First Novelist Award

The dream continues.  (Please don't wake me up.)

Fobbit  was just named a semi-finalist in the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award competition .  My thanks to all the volunteer readers in the Virginia Commonwealth University English Department, the James Branch Cabell Library, and the Richmond literary community who spent hundreds of hours reading through a record-breaking number of submissions (nearly 140 first novels) and who chose Fobbit to be in such fine company.


Congratulations t...

My First Time: Rachael Hanel

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Rachael Hanel, the author of We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter (University of Minnesota Press).  Memoirist Alison Bechdel calls it “Mesmerizing!” and novelist and memoirist Nicole Helget says the book “...

Sunday Sentence: The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented to you out of context and without commentary.



The same old sky was blue and cloudless, vacant as a starlet's smile.

The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman

Postcards from L.A. and Iraq

Having a great time.  Wish you were here....

"Here" being the Los Angles Times Festival of Books .  Despite the heat (it's 8 p.m. and 74 degrees right now) and the poor choice of footwear (boat shoes) while walking around the USC campus, I've enjoyed my two days here at the annual California fest.  In the space of just a few hours, I bumped into lit-friends [name-dropping alert!] Maria Semple, Jonathan Evison, Paul Tremblay, Antoine Wilson, Adam Braver, and Pauls Touton...

Friday Freebie: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Congratulations to Michael Cooper, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey by Shannon Huffman Polson.

This week's book giveaway is a multi-book prize package.  One lucky reader will win copies of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is Soffer's debut n...

Glaciers at the library: World Book Night 2013

Next week, patrons of the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library here in Butte, Montana will witness Glaciers moving through the book stacks.  Not the turquoise-blue icebergs of the Arctic variety, but something just as beautiful: the words on the pages of Alexis M. Smith's debut novel.

Regular readers of The Quivering Pen know that my love for Glaciers , published last year by Tin House Books , runs as deep and wide as the real things carving their way through the mountains of Alaska.  I nam...

The Most Terrifying Town in the World: Horace McCoy's I Should Have Stayed Home

In two days, I'll be jetting across the sky, bound for L.A. for the Los Angeles Times Book Award ceremony and the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  Fobbit  is up for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction on Friday and on the following day, I'll be on a panel called "Fiction With a Sideways Glance" with Jess Walter ( Beautiful Ruins ), Diana Wagman ( The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets ) and Fiona Maazel ( Woke Up Lonely ).  I'm looking forward to the festival, but I have a feel...

Trailer Park Tuesday: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday , a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  In the best cases, a book trailer can be a perfect marriage between text and video.



Trust Joe Hill to turn a place called Christmasland into a kingdom of horror.  As he mentions in the trailer for his new novel NOS4A2 , eternal Yuletide is all well and good...up to a point. "Christmasland is a place where the fun never stops; every morning is Christmas morning and ev...

Pulitzer committee shocks literary world, hands out Fiction Prize

In a stunning turn of events, the Pulitzer Prize committee decided to break with tradition ( begun last year ) and hand out an award in the Fiction category this year, thus confirming the notion that, yes, fabricated narratives are still a force to be reckoned with.

So, congratulations to Adam Johnson who not only emerged victorious from this year's Tournament of the Books , but can now add a P.P. to his already-crowded awards shelf for The Orphan Master's Son .  Well done, sir, well done!

Dou...

My First Time: Jessica Soffer

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Jessica Soffer, author of the debut novel Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots which will be released tomorrow by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Here's how Vogue described the book: "Teenage Lorca, who has been cutting herself since she was six, still...