Archive for April 24, 2012
About the Author
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for In One Person. Internationally renowned, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best-selling novel, in every language.
John Irving is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. He lives in Toronto.
Read MoreJohn Irving discusses In One Person
In this video John discusses his thirteenth novel, In One Person, and his bisexual narrator and main character, Billy Abbott. As Billy says: “We are formed by what we desire.”
Read MoreJohn Irving reads from In One Person
“While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her…”
Read MoreJohn Irving introduces Billy Abbott
“If you were, like me, at an all-boys’ boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I’d always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.” — Billy Abbott, from In One Person.
Read MoreIn One Person: Extended Excerpt
Simon and Schuster have included an extended excerpt from In One Person in their free sampler.The books and authors presented in this sampler also include Carry the One by Carol Anshaw, Gold by Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee, In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer, and The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos.
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