Frederick Weisel's Blog

I saw Salman Rushdie in a public appearance in Marin last
week. He’s just published an account of his 12-1/2 years in hiding, following
the condemnation of his novel, The
Satanic Verses, in 1989 by Muslim extremists and a death sentence handed
down by the Ayatollah Khomeini.


The new book is called Joseph
Anton, the title coming from the code name used for him by the British
Secret

It happened at a now long-forgotten little bookstore on an
out-of-the-way side street, in Cambridge Massachusetts, a few hundred yards
from the gates of Harvard University.


The store was the Phillips-Brentano Bookstore, and I was working
there as a clerk and hardcover buyer while I finished my graduate thesis and
tried to figure out how to be writer. It was a pleasant space, with large glass

This post is a follow-up to my earlier
post of June 24 on writers’ work habits.




John Cheever
After the Second World War, John Cheever, who was to become
one of the country’s great short story writers, moved with
his family to an apartment building at 400 East 59th Street, near Sutton Place, Manhattan. For much of his life, Cheever would be
self-conscious over his lack of education and what

Over the past decade or so, a movement has arisen in this
country to “eat locally”—to choose food (fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and meat)
grown, raised, or made within a 50-mile radius of our homes. The food is fresher,
we use less energy to get it, and we support our neighbors who produce the
food.




I’d like to propose a similar movement to “read locally”—to
seek out novels, poetry, plays,

Several weeks ago, when I posted my blog story about meeting
John Irving, my wife thought that Mr. Irving himself might enjoy story, and she
suggested that I send him a copy. So I mailed a hard copy with a two-sentence cover
letter to his agent in Vermont, and never expected a reply. Last week, I
received the following letter:


“Dear Mr. Weisel: My wife, who is also my literary agent,

In 1999, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series,
came to our small town for a book signing, and the event was as much like a
normal book signing as, say, a hot dog eating contest or a prison riot.


Rowling was then on the front-end of her seven-part set of
fantasy novels. She had written three of the books, with a fourth due out soon.
But, among literary sensations, she was a bit

Readers have long admired the first sentences of novels. But
what about the last lines?


Most readers remember the first line of Moby Dick (“Call me Ishmael.”) How many recall the last line? (“It
was the devious-cruising Rachel that, in her retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan.”)


Are last lines important? Are

I was in my late twenties then and working
as a technical editor at a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One
afternoon, the Vice President for Marketing stopped by my office and invited me
to a party that night in honor of a new young writer, who had just published a
much-anticipated novel. She couldn’t recall the writer’s name, but she
remembered the book had a funny title. She

“I write fast because I have not the brains to write slow.”



His name was Georges Simenon. He’s best known for two
things. He wrote a series of 75 Inspector Maigret novels featuring Paris police
superintendent Jules Maigret. And he wrote each his novels very quickly: usually
in about a week and a half.

He was born in Liege, Belgium and quit school when he was
15. He published his first novel

Frederick Weisel


Whenever an author does a public reading and invites the
audience to ask questions, one question is nearly always posed: “When you write,
do you use a computer or write in longhand?”





This question was more pertinent in the late 1980s, when personal
computers were just beginning to be used in the mainstream, and many writers had
to adjust to the new technology. But,