Posts by Sneed
John 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.
Read MoreInterview with Publishers Weekly
Sexual Outsiders: Three Questions with John Irving. PW caught up with John Irving to discover more about his forthcoming novel, In One Person (S&S, May). The book explores the nature of unfulfilled love through the voice of Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character, who tells the tragicomic story of his life. Your publisher, Jonathan Karp, said that…
Read MoreIn One Person
Billy is not me. He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager… As Billy learns—in part, from being bisexual—our genders and orientations do not define us. We are somehow greater than our sexual identities, but our sexual identities matter. —John Irving
Read MoreThe World According to John Irving: Documentary
A documentary about John Irving has just been released from German filmmaker André Schaefer, called “John Irving und wie er die Welt sieht” (“The World According to John Irving”).
Read MoreA Letter from the Editor
Dear Reader, We use the word “great” so often that we’ve degraded its meaning. Great haircut! Great idea! Great casserole! So what can a book publisher say, without committing sins of hyperbole, about an author who truly does possess greatness? In One Person is John Irving’s thirteenth novel. Having closely read all of the others, I can…
Read MoreJohn Irving: Author Q & A
You can download this Q & A in a print/mobile friendly PDF here. The protagonist and first person narrator of In One Person, Billy Abbott, is bisexual. Why do you think bisexuals are rarely represented in literature? The bisexual men I have known were not shy, nor were they “conflicted.” (This is also true of…
Read MoreExcerpt from In One Person
Download the print/mobile friendly PDF here. Funding provided by Sambla’s lån utan UC, an independent loan comparison service based in Sweden’s financial capital. I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative…
Read MoreLibrary Journal starred review
The Library Journal reviews In One Person. What is “normal”? Does it really matter? In Irving’s latest novel (after Last Night in Twisted River), nearly everyone has a secret, but the characters who embrace and accept their own differences and those of others are the most content. This makes the narrator, Bill, particularly appealing. Bill knows from…
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