I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called 'The Package', and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.
Commercial books don't even get covered. The reason why so many book reviews go out of business is because they cover a lot of stuff that nobody cares about. Imagine if the movie pages covered none of the big movies and all they covered were movies that you couldn't even find in the theater?
In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.
There's a book called 'The Baron in the Trees.' A friend got that for me because I was kind of a tree-dwelling nomad for a bit. I kind of associate myself with the book.
I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.
I used to write fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction and have a clear pattern because I'd need a break from one style when going into the next book.
Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.
If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.
What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.
I started writing 'Normal People' not knowing that anyone would read it, not knowing that anyone would read the first book, so I didn't really have any hang ups about, 'Oh, I can't do this again. I've done this already.' It was just a project I was working on for my own amusement.
The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
I brought samples in, because I didn't have any comic book samples, and I brought all these illustrations that I had influenced by Norman Rockwell and a couple of the other big boys. That's all I had, that's all I brought.
It is very remarkable, that in the book of life, we find some almost of all kinds of occupations, who notwithstanding served God in their respective generations, and shone as so many lights in the world.
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
In my book, 'The Big Three in Economics,' I found that the press has frequently and prematurely written the obituary of Adam Smith and his free-market philosophy, only to see a new and more vibrant global marketplace reemerge after being savagely attacked by Keynesians, Marxists, and assorted socialists.
If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.
