Surprising readers while delivering expected pleasures - with your own publishing company behind it - is hard work. “They’re really hard to write,” she admitted. What do all these developments portend for fans of Claire DeWitt? Gran is working on the next book, but it will be a couple of years before it’s ready. “I want to create a new contract that gives writers more rights in their work and more transparent accounting,” she said. It’s been hard and stressful and I f- up a lot, but it’s also been really, really fun.” Her plan is to work out all the kinks with her own material and then publish two to four books a year by other writers. “The more I worked on the book,” she said, “the less I cared if it sells. Writers are asked to shoulder so much of the burden of bringing a book to market, Gran thought, that she might as well do it herself. “I felt like I was going to kick myself for the rest of my life if I gave this book to Simon’s House of Random Penguins and they dropped the ball on it and it fell through the cracks and it turned into one of these s- shows,” she said. Contributors on why you’ll have to guess who wrote what. “Anonymous Sex” brings stories from Téa Obreht, Louise Erdrich, Mary-Louise Parker and more.

We have such a lack of good words in commonly spoken, everyday colloquial English to talk about sex.”īooks Sex writing as literary parlor game? Why 27 writers decided to bare (almost) all I’d always avoided writing about sex because it’s really hard to write about well. “I could have followed the same template and had a career writing detective novels over and over again, but that’s not what I want to do with my life. “I think, as a writer, it’s a good idea to challenge yourself and do what you haven’t done before,” she said. For Gran, the choice to make sex a major aspect of the story was very intentional. As the intensity of the rituals escalates, so do the stakes for the participants - with unexpected consequences. The book that Lily seeks outlines a series of spells that must be completed by a pair of willing partners. What distinguishes “The Book of the Most Precious Substance” from Gran’s other novels is lots and lots of sex. It’s still this primary story for me, that one day, I will find a book and everything will make sense.”

“I don’t know where I got this idea that if you just find the right book, everything will change,” Gran said, “but it’s one of those things that I can’t shake, no matter how many times it fails to happen in real life and no matter how many times I write about it.

Books Author Sara Gran is as blunt as her Claire DeWitt characterĪuthor Sara Gran is as blunt as her Claire DeWitt character

Claire dewitt novels