A Convergence of Self-Promotion

Sometimes the freelance gods decide that a whole bunch of pieces turned in at wildly different times should all run in the same 24-hour window. First up is “The Permanent Prince,” a news & trends piece for Poets & Writers on two debut novelists who reinvent Hamlet in some way:

Now two new novels, published within a month

of each other, bring Hamlet into

sharper contemporary focus—and they could not be more different. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David

Wroblewski, released by Ecco in June, is a sprawling, nearly six-hundred-page

work of contemporary Americana that devotes the bulk of its storyline to a

dynasty of purebred dogs raised by the Sawtelle family in rural Wisconsin and

hotly coveted by others with mercenary designs. Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country, published

this month by Little, Brown, combines the lean feel of a thriller with a moving

portrait of teenage emotional angst in the Minnesota heartland….

As often happens, I had a lot of extra material from talking with Wroblewski and turned some of that into a Q&A that runs on Vulture.

Finally, the review of Zoe Ferraris’s FINDING NOUF I mentioned was in the pipeline runs in today’s Los Angeles Times.