Last week I gave you thumbnail recommendations of five novels written between 1961 and 1986 that make me swoon. Here are five more spanning the period from 1989 until the early 2000s. THIS WEEK The Remains Of The Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) Poor Things, Alasdair Gray (1992) Kafka On The Shore, Haruki Murakami (2002) Cloud…
My family and friends call them “Bruce Books,” in voices that are filled with love and despair and a desperate need to flee the room before I press copies in their hands. If they make the mistake of taking a book, they know I will turn up in a corner of their bedroom some night…
Let’s talk about writing a novel. Jim and I sat down to write Uncommon Scents three years ago. We thought we knew what that meant. We had a firm understanding that it would require a lot of words arranged sequentially. We knew words. We hoped that was enough. But then we remembered: punctuation! We stocked…
There are two secrets to becoming a bestselling author. (1) Be fiercely talented. (2) Release your first book no later than about 1990. Today? The odds are roughly zero that you will sell a lot of books if you’re working on your first book now. They’re not exactly zero. That’s an exaggeration. They’re just so…