Attention All Book Clubs and Discussion Groups

A special offer from Joshua Henkin author of Matrimony:

Hi, book blogger friends. I wanted to let you know about a special offer my publisher Vintage is making to book groups. Sign up by midnight September 21 and Vintage will set up a phone chat for your book group with me to discuss MATRIMONY, my NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE novel, which has just come out in paperback. Normally, only five book groups are chosen among the entrants, but I have agreed to talk to all book groups that sign up. Here's the link to do so. http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/chat.html. I hope this will be of interest to your own book groups, and also, I'd love it if you'd post about this on your blogs. Thanks in advance.

Best,

Josh
http://www.joshuahenkin.com

PRAISE FOR MATRIMONY, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a
National Booksense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices Selection:

"In the tradition of John Cheever and Richard Yates ... a novel about
love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time's passage
raises us up even as it grinds us down. It's a beautiful book. Here's to
its brilliant future."
--Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Hours

"Truly an up-all-night read."
--Adriana Leshko, The Washington Post

"Mr. Henkin writes with a winningly anachronistic absence of
showiness.... This is just a lifelike, likable book populated by three-dimensional
characters who make themselves very much at home on the page."
--Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Beguiling.... [Henkin write] effortless scenes that float between
past and present. [He creates] an almost personal nostalgia for these
characters."
--Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] charming novel ... Henkin keeps you reading with original
characters, witty dialogue and a view that marriage, for all its flaws, is worth the
trouble."
--Tom Fields-Meyer, People

"Radiates the kind of offbeat shoulder-shrugging charm that made Michael
Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh so memorable.... [Matrimony] gets
to you and stays with you."
--Kirkus Reviews

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The above is the entire contents of the email I received from Joshua Henkin today. I hope it isn't too uncool of me to have pasted the whole thing but I needed something quick and easy to post as I'm busy reading Matrimony and preparing my review for the giveaway post early next week. I had hoped to post it Sunday but since my husband counts on using the laptop most of Sunday, I would have to have the post prepared by late Saturday and then I wouldn't be able to monitor any issues arising until late-night Sunday anyway. So now I'm thinking wee hours of Monday morning (Pacific Coast Time) as the most likely time for the post to go up.

I'm feeling quite silly about how much I'm stressing about this one. I've not felt this much pressure about an 'assignment' since I was in college. I don't know how much that has to do with Mr. Henkin being a professor and how much is due to the characters of Matrimony themselves being college students for most of the first hundred pages and one of them then becoming a professor himself.

Being immersed in a story set on a campus tends to trigger all the old emotions from my own time on a campus even though I was eight years older then Henkin's characters when I went back to school and had been married for six years so I didn't experience it quite the way they did. But maybe that is why I'm stressed by it because going to school for me at age 27 was all business and more like going to a job so that what gets brought up for me is memories of 18 credit work loads, all night stints at a typewritter and the judgments of my professors. No softening of all that with campus functions, friends, romance etc.

Or it could just be that I'm a victim once again of the same mind game I've played on myself since kindergarten. It's called Set the Bar Too High To Reach and Then Kick Yourself To Timbuktu When You Fail. Sigh. Too silly for words.