William Landay

Official website of the author

Archives for 2012

Whale and Calf

“Whale and Calf,” artist unknown, ca. 1830.

“Whale and Calf,” artist unknown, ca. 1830.

“What it shows is a whale calf in the mouth of its mother. She is not, of course, eating it. (Those teeth are useless.) She is trying to rescue it. And that, my friends, was all part of the whalers’ fiendish plan. If whalers — big drivers of the economy in early industrial America — could get their harpoons into a whale calf they never missed their chance, because harpooning the baby was a perfect way to lure in the adult. The bigger the whale, the more oil.” More on this painting here.

Aaron Sorkin: Now all I have to do…

At the moment I’m at roughly the same place I was when I decided to write ‘The Social Network’ — which is to say I don’t know what the movie’s about yet. I know it won’t be a biography as it’s very hard to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biopic. I know that Jobs was a very complicated and dynamic genius who fought a number of dramatic battles. I know that like Edison, Marconi (and Philo Farnsworth), he invented something we love. I think that has a lot to do with our love affair with him. We’re told every day that America’s future is basically in service but our history is in building things — railroads and cars and cities — but Steve Jobs, in building something that’s taking us to our future, has also taken us to one of the best parts of our past. Now all I have to do is turn that into three acts with an intention, obstacle, exposition, inciting action, reversal, climax and denouement and make it funny and emotional and I’ll be in business.

Aaron Sorkin on the forthcoming film version of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs

The backlist is back

The success of Defending Jacob — now in its 17th week on the Times bestseller list, at #23 for ebooks, #24 for hardcovers, among the longest runs on either list — has had a nice byproduct: there is renewed interest in my two earlier books, Mission Flats and The Strangler. Both are being reissued in the U.S. today as trade paperbacks (the larger paperback size) with lovely new covers. The new covers, I think, are truer to the books than the original designs. I particularly like the new Mission Flats cover. If you’re interested in buying either book online, the links are here for Mission Flats and here for The Strangler. Better yet, go to your local independent bookstore.

All good news. There seems to be no other kind lately, for which I am very, very grateful. Thank you. Truly, to all the people who have made Defending Jacob such a roaring success — the many hundreds of thousands who have bought it, read it, passed it around, talked it up, discussed it in book clubs, sent me such kind messages — thank you. It’s been a great run and there’s no end in sight, with the paperback edition still to come and (fingers crossed, if we’re lucky, don’t want to jinx anything, but maybe, just maybe…) the movie. Stay tuned.

Bradbury: Action is hope

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad — you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

Ray Bradbury