About the Book
Included here is an audio excerpt from John Irving’s novel The Last Chairlift.
Read MoreOne of the world’s greatest authors returns with his first novel in seven years—a ghost story and a love story, spanning eight decades of sexual politics.
Read MoreDear Readers, I’ve finished the second act of my new novel, Darkness as a Bride. It is a story told in three acts. First draft pages pile up as I progress through the novel – my desk is lined with stacks of paper. I took a photo of the last four hand-written chapters in Act…
Read MoreAvenue of Mysteries is available as an audiobook, too. Hear an excerpt with reader Armando Durán. As Irving says of Durán, “My wife Janet and I loved his reading of Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’ We love his voice, and the way he interprets the dialogue of characters in novels, especially.”…
Read MoreIn these three book trailers, John Irving discusses Avenue of Mysteries. IN THE FIRST TRAILER, Irving describes the parallel tracks on which the story is told: In one story, there is a a fourteen-year-old boy named Juan Diego, growing up in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the other story, Juan Diego is fifty-four years old and travelling…
Read MoreJuan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you.
Read MoreAs a novelist, I know something that works better than any synopsis of what a new novel is about. You would be better off reading the first few paragraphs of the first chapter, because that’s all the author wanted you to know about the book before you start reading it for yourself. Believe me: the author just wants you to begin reading.
Read MoreBilly 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
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