There are many more vibrant insights to savor here about writers and the writing life. Mix together some fragile egos, booze, maybe some politics, and it usually gets rowdy.” That is, according to bookseller Bruce, the “nature of the breed.
#Camino island series#
She immediately takes the young writer Mercer under her wing, and Grisham paints a series of scenes that get to the core of the writing life and its complex relationships: novice/master commercial/literary good/bad.Īs one might expect, where writers gather, there will be drama. They are presided over by the scene-stealing Myra Beckwith, a Gertrude Stein-inspired creation whose salons on the island are bawdy, backbiting, and hilarious. In addition to a vital customer base, Bruce's store has drawn in a coterie of writers. (Customers of Oxford’s Square Books and Jackson’s own Lemuria, be on the lookout for familiar scenery.)
But on the surface, he is anything but shady he has built a thriving bookstore on hand-selling and author appearances-the kind of business Amazon will never do-and inspired considerable local loyalty. More: John Grisham: An excerpt from his new novel, 'Camino Island'īruce Cable gets that, which makes him a prime suspect.
More: John Grisham doing 1st big book tour in 25 years It blends the zeal of a novice with the élan of a professional. As such, it has the feel of Grisham reaching out to his readers across the trunk of his old Saab, either downtown at the Capitol or upstate in the parking lot of Ruth and Jimmie’s. Yet his latest, "Camino Island," reads like the Grisham of old-like a young author burning with a good story to tell, eager to bend your ear with a yarn you can’t resist. Grisham became a perennial best-seller, sold books by the millions, and has been translated into forty languages. Since then, the digital era reared its head, and any of the twenty-odd Grisham novels that followed "A Time to Kill" were much more likely to be downloaded than bought direct. That first novel and the personal hand-selling of it have become a part of publishing lore. In fact, his fans delight in recounting decidedly low-tech tales of the young author peddling copies of his first book, "A Time to Kill," everywhere he went. The Innocent Man (October 2006) marked his first foray into non-fiction, and Ford County (November 2009) was his first short story collection.John Grisham’s career took off in the pre-internet era, before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Amazon. Nine of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man.
There are currently over 300 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 40 languages. Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written one novel a year (his other books are The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, A Painted House, Skipping Christmas, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Appeal, The Associate, The Confession, The Litigators, Calico Joe, The Racketeer, Sycamore Row, and Gray Mountain) and all of them have become international bestsellers.