William Landay

Official website of the author

Defending Jacob

Picturing Jacob

I have a bit of a strange request: My publisher is looking for photos of Defending Jacob on display in bookstores. I don’t have any, but I said I’d call out the troops.

To sweeten the pot, the best photo will win a signed first edition of any of my three books — your choice.

Either post your photo here on Tumblr or email it to me direct at bill@williamlanday.com. Be sure to let me know what bookstore your photo shows.

Feel free to share this message, forward it, tape it to your forehead, etc. The more submissions, the better.

Thank you!

Bookplates are back

Bookplate

The last bookplate giveaway was so popular, we blew through my supply in just a few weeks. But a new shipment just arrived, and this bookplate is even nicer than the last — beautiful letterpress printing on thick paper. Even better than a plain old signed book. And your showoff friends who read the ebook on their fancy iPads will be sick with envy. (A photo of the full bookplate is here.)

For those of you who missed it the first time around, this is just my way of saying thank you to readers who can’t get to a reading to have their books signed in person. There’s no charge. Just send me your snail mail address and any special inscription you might want (“For Uncle Marvin on his 73rd birthday…”). Reminder: for security reasons, don’t post your mailing address in the comments section. Send it to me in an email (you can use the form here).

Thanks again, everyone.

Into the Woods

Cold Spring Park

A blog post I did for Random House over on Tumblr:

Into the Woods

Does it help to see where a novel is set? Would you understand Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County any better if you actually visited his Mississippi? Is it even possible to understand Dickens if you have no idea what Victorian London looked like?

I’m not sure there is a good answer. Sometimes the vision in the your mind’s eye is more vivid than any mere reality. Real life can be so disappointing. Remember when, a few months ago, the mansion said to have inspired Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was to be leveled? To me, the most compelling part of that story was how disappointing the mansion actually was — how unworthy of Jay Gatsby. Even the famous lawn, now turned weedy, was disappointing. Clearly the lawn in the news photos never “started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.” Of course, no lawn ever did that — and maybe that’s the point. Great fiction always outruns reality.

Still, people who read my novel Defending Jacob always ask me which details from the book are real. We want to know, we readers, just where the border between reality and fiction lies. In the novel, a teenage boy is murdered in Cold Spring Park, in Newton, Massachusetts. As it happens, both the park and the town are very real. I live in Newton and jog through Cold Spring Park all the time, as does the Barber family of my novel.

So, for the curious out there, here is a photo of the park, which I took just a couple of days ago, on May 10 — very near the date of the murder in the book (April 12), so this is roughly what the park would have looked like on the day of the crime, lush and green and muddy with the spring melt. If you’re curious, more pictures of Cold Spring Park are here.

The post includes this photo of Cold Spring Park, the setting of the murder in Defending Jacob.

The latest on Defending Jacob

It’s been a while since I posted one of these updates about Defending Jacob, so here we go.

The biggest news: Warner Brothers has optioned Defending Jacob for a movie. No actors or directors are attached to the project yet. It will likely be a year or so before we have a screenplay, which will make or break the project since it is the screenplay, not the novel, that will attract actors and directors. Now, what I know about the movie business would fit on the head of a pin, so I won’t predict how this will turn out or even whether the movie will be made at all. But every indication is that the producers are intent on making this happen. Stay tuned.

Last week, Defending Jacob was published in the UK. My English publisher, Orion, has orchestrated a phenomenal publicity effort. Luckily, I will be in London in April to see it (and to drop by the London Book Fair, briefly). The first reviews from England have arrived as well, all quite favorable. In The Times, Marcel Berlins wrote that Defending Jacob is “worthy of being mentioned in the same breath [as Presumed Innocent], which is a high compliment.” It certainly is.

Another exciting aspect of this whole adventure has been foreign sales. Defending Jacob has sold in nineteen foreign countries, an absurd number. Now, the trouble with selling so many foreign-language editions is that sooner or later you run out of places to keep selling. Which is why it was so remarkable when we sold the book in Macedonia last week. Because, well, it’s Macedonia. The advance will barely cover a dinner out with my family, and the print run probably will be around 500 copies. Still, I would bet that more American novels are optioned for film than are translated into Macedonian, so let’s pause to savor this milestone, too.

Finally, yesterday morning was a remarkable one here in Boston, where I scored a publicity twofer. First, my hometown newspaper, the Globe, ran an interview with me — and put my mug at the top of page one. This is the very definition of a slow news day, one would think, but there it was. And second, I appeared on the popular morning drive-time show “Matty in the Morning.” The show’s host, Matt Siegel, is a Boston institution and a genuine, enthusiastic fan of Defending Jacob. (You can listen to the interview here.) So Bostonians on their way to work yesterday could hardly escape me.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.