David Abrams's Blog, page 2

Sunday Sentence: I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott

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


If you met him, you would want to marry him. But you can’t, because I already did.

*     *     *
When I am packing a suitcase and I’ve crammed every last rectangle of folded clothing into the bag and added shoes, makeup, a just-in-case-it’s-cold cardigan and a panicked last-minute backup outfit or two, and I’m mashing everything down as hard as I can, and I go from zero to psycho in a sec...

Friday Freebie: Brave Deeds by David Abrams

Congratulations to Teresa Sweeney, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Fobbit by David Abrams (That’s-a me!).

This week, I’m rounding out the Quivering Pen’s 10th Anniversary celebration with the other novel written during this blog’s lifespan: Brave Deeds , published in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic. Like Fobbit, Brave Deeds is set in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but it’s written in a much darker shade of ink. “[Brave Deeds] builds to an emotionally wrenching and tension-filled climax . . . F...

Birthday Bash

I don’t remember this day at all. It was my 10th birthday, a decade of life, so you’d think even my young brain would have marked it as a milestone: a day to remember.

But it wasn’t until my mother (seen here in mid-sing of “Happy Birthday” on May 27, 1973) sent me this photo three days ago that the memories came, not flooding back but seeping through a thick filter of age. The dining room table set, hand-crafted and painted by the Amish and purchased by my parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania when...

Sunday Sentence: The Wasp Eater by William Lychack

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


At the bottom of everything, they were a family of silence—nothing but blind, black, coal-crumbling silence, his father never anchored or steady like his mother, his mother never sanguine or loose like his father.

The Wasp Eater by William Lychack

Friday Freebie: Fobbit by David Abrams

Congratulations to Jane Rainey, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso.

As I mentioned earlier , this month marks the 10th Anniversary of The Quivering Pen. So, in honor of that decade of blogging, I’m offering up a signed copy of the book that was there at the very beginning: Fobbit , by yours truly. The blog proved to be a sort of child’s growth chart for the novel: I wrote about the process and content for several months before Fobbit w...

A Decade of Quivering

Ten years ago this month, I found myself closing in on the end of the first draft of my first published novel. [cue montage of furrowed brow, fingers tapping keys, pencil gripped between teeth]

At the same time, I was feeling full of book chatter, bursting at the seams like I’d just overeaten at Heavy-Meats Burger Shack, but had no one with whom to converse. I was lonely for a book community. [cue montage of staring out the window, heavy sighs, the silvery track of a single tear caught in mid-af...

Sunday Sentence: The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson

Simply put, the best sentence(s) Ive read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


In war, as in farming, topography was fate.

The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson

Friday Freebie: The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso

Congratulations to Columbus Moore, winner of last weeks Friday Freebie contest: The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky.

This weeks contest is for The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso. Perhaps youve been spending your quarantine life starting a little indoor garden, or maybe you just miss walking through a field of wildflowers, inhaling deeply with every other step. Either way, this richly-illustrated book about the flora in our lives should prove to be some interesting reading...

Friday Freebie: The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Congratulations to Mike Cooper, winner of last weeks Friday Freebie contest: Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him by Tracy Borman.

This weeks contest is for The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky. If you havent already done so, you should check out Elizabeths recent guest posts here at the Pen: A Suitcase of Books and My First In-Depth Encounter with an Actual Author . Her new book has just been released and readers are already singing its praises: The Memory Eaters functions as love letters...

My First Time: Margo Orlando Littell

The First Time My Life Imitated My Art
In 1889, Oscar Wilde claimed in an essay, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. I found this to be all too eerily true when I began researching and writing my novel The Distance from Four Points . I set the novel in a fictionalized version of my hometown, an impoverished former coal-mining town in the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania, and many details of my setting are drawn from life: blighted homes, neglected commercial...