Some News on "Vigil"
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Anton Chekhov
15 min read
The author quotes Chekhov's philosophy about art formulating problems rather than solving them. Readers would benefit from deeper context on Chekhov's literary philosophy and his influence on modern short fiction.
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Lincoln in the Bardo
9 min read
The author mentions this is his previous novel and references its audiobook director. Understanding this Booker Prize-winning experimental novel provides context for what to expect from Vigil.
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National Book Award
11 min read
The author casually mentions attending the National Book Awards in New York. Understanding the prestige and history of this major American literary prize contextualizes the author's standing in contemporary literature.
Hi All,
I wanted to share some news with you. On Wednesday, December 10th (also known as the Tenth of December, ha ha) at 1:30 PM EST, I’m going to go live here on Substack and read a short preview from the very beginning of the new novel, Vigil, which you can read about and pre-order here.
It’s my first time going live (!), but Substack has let me know that if you follow me, you’ll automatically get an email with a link to join as soon as the live starts. And if you’re on the app, you’ll get an alert with a link.
I’ll also, on that live event, be announcing the cast of the audiobook, which has been (under the brilliant direction of the great Kelly Gildea, who also directed the audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo) a grand creative adventure.
Hope you’ll be able to join me on Wednesday….
This is the exciting but harrowing period in the publication of a book when, with the writing all done (as I think I mentioned, I sent the very last tweaks off just before our trip to New York for the National Book Awards), the waiting-to-see begins. Will people read it? Will they like it?
I’ve started to do interviews about the book and so am thinking and speaking about it in a different way - in a sense, I’m “learning” the book, as opposed to being deep inside it, altering it so as to make it more itself, by, mostly, feeling.
Now I have to articulate what it all means, as well as I can. While, at the same time, not being entirely sure myself. I often invoke the “roller-coaster-designer” metaphor and I am finding that I believe it more than ever: the writer’s job is to make a wild ride…and the meaning appears (or descends, or is revealed) after that’s been done.
I find myself also really seeing the wisdom in that Chekhov quote we talked about last week: “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly.”
So all of the revising I did on Vigil was a form of making the various oppositions in the book more stout, less easy to dismiss…which will, I hope, result in a wilder, more undeniable ride for the reader.
One significant moment this week, I got
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