My new book, Dead Wake, won’t be out until March 10, but it’s begun collecting some nice advance reviews from publications that try to give bookstores and libraries a heads-up as to what to buy. Here’s the latest, an item from Britain’s The Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson’s Editor’s Picks: ‘Marvelous…will haul your heart up to your mouth as . . .
Read MoreMy latest book is very nearly done. The book has a cover, which I love. There’s something austere and desolate about that long wake receding toward the horizon. It’s a very appropriate image, especially given that the book’s title, Dead Wake, is a maritime term that describes the fading disturbance that lingers on the surface . . .
Read MoreI’m now in that phase of writing a book that I enjoy most. The research is more or less done, and I’ve written a passable first draft and a decent—maybe even good—second draft. Now I have a book. It has a beginning, middle, and end. And now I can go through all my notes and . . .
Read MoreI was delighted to learn this week that Amazon had included my book, The Devil in the White City, in its bucket list of 100 books to read before you die. Considering the list includes works by George Orwell, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Dickens, and many other literary heroes, I feel a bit humbled, . . .
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Whenever I write a book, there comes a time when I start reading portions of the manuscript aloud to myself. It’s a sure-fire way to spot flaws in grammar, cadence, and voice. I’ve found that reading aloud also helps me to gauge, and adjust, the emotive power of individual passages, especially if I read them . . .
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It’s hard to believe that in one week we’ll be on our way home, after six months here in Paris. I thought I’d share now some observations on the more subtle aspects of life in the city. There is, of course, the miraculous Paris of cliché–baguettes, cafés, the Eiffel Tower, and so forth–but there is . . .
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Unlike back home in America, where Thanksgiving serves as a kind of starting gun for the Christmas season, here Christmas advances more slowly, expressed as a gradual shift in mood and spirit. One day you walk down a street and there’s no sign of decoration. The next, there’s some subtle, pretty change in a display . . .
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I had planned to reside here in Paris secretly, and not tell my French publisher, but then I thought, why be a jerk, a thought that comes to me all too often and in fact a thought that comes to my friends quite often when they think of me. So, I revealed my presence, and . . .
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My wife and I have temporarily moved to Paris, where we’ve rented an apartment. For her, it’s a sabbatical; for me, it’s work, though work of the most pleasant kind. Paris will be my base for the European phase of the research I need to do for my current project, which of course I will . . .
Read MoreDuring my recent paperback tour for In the Garden of Beasts, I had the honor of being interviewed on stage at the U.S. Holocaust Museum by the brilliant journalist, Jane Mayer, of The New Yorker. (Disclosure: Once upon a time we were colleagues at The Wall Street Journal.) At intervals during the interview, the museum . . .
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