I Now Pronounce You -- The Winners

Because I am two days late in announcing the winners of Joshua Henkin's MATRIMONY, I decided to give away two copies.

And the lucky winners are Elizabeth and Kelly!

Ladies, if you'll send me your mailing addresses, I'll have your books to you by the middle of the week. Enjoy!

MATRIMONY Giveaway

Joshua Henkin’s first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year. His second novel, Matrimony, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Book Sense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices Selection. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. Visit Joshua at www.joshuahenkin.com

From the author's website:

"It is 1987, and Julian Wainwright, aspiring writer and Waspy son of New York City old money, meets beautiful, Jewish Mia Mendelsohn in the laundry room at Graymont College. So begins a love affair that, spurred on by family tragedy, will take Julian and Mia across the country and back, through several college towns, spanning twenty years.

From the moment he was born, Julian Wainwright has lived a life of Waspy privilege. The son of a Yale-educated investment banker, he grew up in a huge apartment on Sutton Place, high above the East River, and attended a tony Manhattan private school. Yet, more than anything, he wants to get out--out from under his parents' influence, off to Graymont College, in western Massachusetts, where he hopes to become a writer.

When he arrives, in the fall of 1986, Julian meets Carter Heinz, a scholarship student from California with whom he develops a strong but ambivalent friendship. Carter's mother, desperate to save money for his college education, used to buy him reversible clothing, figuring she was getting two items for the price of one. Now, spending time with Julian, Carter seethes with resentment. He swears he will grow up to be wealthy--wealthier, even, than Julian himself.

Then, one day, flipping through the college facebook, Julian and Carter see a photo of Mia Mendelsohn. Mia from Montreal, they call her. Beautiful, Jewish, the daughter of a physics professor at McGill, Mia is--Julian and Carter agree--dreamy, urbane, stylish, refined.

But Julian gets to Mia first, meeting her by chance in the college laundry room. Soon they begin a love affair that--spurred on by family tragedy--will carry them to graduation and beyond, taking them through several college towns, spanning twenty years. But when Carter reappears, working for an Internet company in California, he throws everyone's life into turmoil: Julian's, Mia's, his own.

Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in the new millennium, Matrimony is about love and friendship, about money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It asks what happens to a marriage when it is confronted by betrayal and the specter of mortality. What happens when people marry younger than they'd expected? Can love endure the passing of time?

In its emotional honesty, its luminous prose, its generosity and wry wit, Matrimony is a beautifully detailed portrait of what it means to share a life with someone--to do so when you're young, and to try again, afresh, on the brink of middle age."

If you'd prefer to hear an interview with the author, check out this video from ExpandedBooks:

I had Matrimony on my wish list soon after it was released. I've always had an affinity for the academic novel and stories that feature writers. In the fall of 2007 I read this guest post Joshua Henkin did on M.J. Rose's, Backstory and this one at Conversational Reading. These are both great posts that go into detail about the process of writing Matrimony and I think it's interesting (and somewhat reassuring) that the author's first novel took three years to write and the second took ten.

If you Google Joshua Henkin, you'll find pages and pages of hits. This author has to be the James Brown of the publishing industry and I'm sure his publishing house loves him. Published and soon to be published authors should take note of the promotion efforts this author has taken to get the word out about this book.

Everything I've read that he's written has been engaging and entertaining but I have to say, he had me with his marathon series of guest blog posts at The Elegant Variation (please note that the preceding link takes you to all 26 guest posts from September 2008 at TEV, but you'll have to scroll past the first five guest posts to get to Josh's posts. Or don't scroll past them because they're all about Jose Saramago's novel, Blindness, one of my favorite reads last year). I don't know the story behind the guest posting challenge that resulted in the 26 posts, but they're truly worth taking the time to read. There are gems on writing and craft, the publishing business, popular culture, questions writers get asked, politics, books and writers, and all kinds of surprising topics. And Joshua Henkin is funny.

Now I actually felt a little guilty because even though I planned to buy the book, I won an autographed copy of Matrimony at Leslie Pietrzyk's excellent blog, Work in Progress. I received the book with a lovely personalized note from the author soon after and I took it with me to Scotland.

I really enjoyed the novel and my recommendation is that if you loved Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner, you'll love Matrimony.

If you'd like a chance to win a copy of Matrimony, please send me an email at lisa dot eudaemonia at gmail dot com. I'll choose a winner at the end of the week and your copy will be on its way.

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And The Winner is Debra and ME!

I wrote each name down on tiny pieces of paper, shook them up, and Scott made the blind selection. Debra of From Skilled Hands fame and Little Blue Santa renown, please email your mailing address to lisa dot eudaemonia at gmail dot com and I will have your copy of Orange Mint and Honey to you pronto! I know you're going to love this book.

I apologize to all for the delay in announcing the winner. Nobody wants to hear my whining, but I was sick and miserable all weekend. I should be reading, writing, visiting and spouting political nonsense again in short order. Thank you for your patience.

What goes around apparently does come around because I was the lucky winner of a copy of Matrimony, by Joshua Henkin last week and my book arrived yesterday from the author himself with a charming, personalized inscription.


This book and I were meant to find each other. Months ago, when the book was first published in hardcover, I read the reviews and I was tempted to buy it, but I resisted. Maybe it was the towering TBR stack and maybe it was my resistance to reading a novel written by an academic. The more I read about Matrimony and about Joshua Henkin, the more I wanted to read the book. Then, Joshua Henkin guest blogged at The Elegant Variation this summer. Not only did he guest blog -- he super-blogged. This series of 24 guest blog posts at TEV concludes here, but scroll backwards and read them all. What a great series of posts for writers.

I am sure I'll have much more to say about Matrimony when I post about books I've read in October. Like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (which I read and LOVED in September), Matrimony was a book the author took many years to complete. I suspect I'll find the same qualities of fine prose in Matrimony that I did in Sawtelle. I won my copy of the book at Work-in-Progress, a blog in which author Leslie Pietrzyk explores the creative process and all things literary. Lots of great things here and now I'm of course anxious to read some of Leslie Pietrzyk's work.

Lots of water, hot herbal tea, cough syrup and tissues have been consumed in our germy house these last days and alas, the glorious rewriting I envisioned for myself over the weekend did not take place. Oy. What are you going to do?

Like millions of others, Scott and I have been focused on the election and on the economy. We thought the debate was pretty exciting and although we thought it felt like somewhat of a draw at the end, apparently America's undecideds were more decidedly pro-Obama by the end.

The $700B economic bill is giving me chilling deja vu about the decision to invade Iraq back in 2003. Totally different issues, but I feel a familiar tendency to frighten the American public into supporting something we don't quite understand and that I doubt Congress really understands either. Me personally? I hate the idea of pouring $700B our taxpayer money into private industry and I really don't understand how it all trickles down to hurt "Main Street" in the end. I'll keep my eyes and ears open and hope the politicians can help us to all understand.

Everybody have the calendars cleared for the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday? I sure do! The selections of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin speak volumes about Barack Obama and John McCain. Now let's see how these two do when speaking for themselves and their running mates.

Here's a little sanity check for Eudaemonia readers. Have you decided who you'll vote for yet? Has any event made you change your mind or confirmed your decision since the conventions and if so, what what it? Maybe because of my background in the military, foreign policy is always my biggest focus. That's because I believe that how we implement and fund foreign policy efforts directly drives how we tend to domestic programs. After the debate, I felt like I was watching an old world/Cold War view of the world pitted against a 21st century globalized view of the world and that you can't separate what happens to health care from when or if we leave Iraq. How about you? How much does foreign relations affect your view of the candidates?

DISCLAIMER: I think I'm still a little feverish, so if absolutely nothing I've said in this post makes any sense at all, then mea culpa.