Updated Info on David Wroblewski

In the end, this isn’t a novel about dogs or heartland America, it’s a novel about the human heart and the mysteries that live there, understood but impossible to articulate….

” as her latest book club pick, calling the debut novel a classic and the “best novel I’ve read in a long, long, long time.”

“Edgar Sawtelle,” which Wroblewski worked on for about a decade, is the story of a mute boy who communicates best with his dogs.

Wroblewski spent 25 years in software development before publishing this, his first book.

It is certain to get a lot hotter with one of the biggest boosts any book can get these days: a little sticker on the cover proclaiming “Edgar Sawtelle” as one of Winfrey’s book club selections.

And The Story of Edgar Sawtelle will find a home on bestseller lists.

“A stately, wonderfully written debut novel… [Wroblewski] takes an intense interest in his characters; takes pains to invest emotion and rough understanding in them; and sets them in motion with graceful language… a boon for dog lovers, and for fans of storytelling that eschews flash.

The Great American Novel is something like a unicorn – rare and wonderful….

Nothing quite compares to my experience of reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

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Wroblewski said he has been amazed by the reception the book, which he called a “very private project,” has received, saying that he wasn’t even sure he would find a publisher for it.

The most enchanting debut novel of the summer… this is a great, big, mesmerizing read, audaciously envisioned as classic Americana…. Pick up this book and expect to feel very, very reluctant to put it down.

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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle… [will] leave you crying for more….

Wroblewski grew up in rural Wisconsin, the setting for his book, and now lives near Denver with his partner, writer Kimberly McClintock.

I found it so rich, and the writing so fascinating and good, that it had me starting to think about Western-but-not-Western: a visit with the thing that makes Westerns work.

Two predictions: The Outlander will win at least one major award.

That resonated for me, both with the idea of a character that has a connection with dogs, and also with the plot of the story in my head, in which the character has to act and can’t act, both at the same time.

“I expected there would be a few readers out there who would connect with it, but what happened this summer was not on my radar at all,” he said.

It is a class apart—a 570-page literary novel that has as much emotional punch as anything I have ever read.

Edgar might be silent, but his story will echo with readers for a long time.

And one thing about a character that can’t talk: If they’re going to exist in the world at all, they have to act.

Wroblewski appeared via satellite on Friday’s program, telling Winfrey from his home in Colorado about writing the book in restaurants and waiting areas and at picnic tables whenever he could, as he worked full-time as a software developer.

When we discovered these two remarkable debut novels and decided to feature them together in Indiespensable, Powell’s subscription club, someone on staff proposed a joint interview with the authors.

I guess I’d have to pick a book by Howard Akler called The City Man.

Winfrey, saying the book was part mystery, cautioned viewers to avoid reading the inside cover because she felt that gave away too much of the story.

And yet The Outlander and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle share more than you might imagine: runaways, ghostly visions, improvised outdoor survival, scenes rendered so powerfully you may forget you’re reading fiction , and characters that linger long after you close the book.

Yet every few years or so, we trip across some semblance of one….

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To me, that’s a metaphor that has no limit, and a lot of the story I was trying to write explored that metaphor in terms of the human beings and in terms of the animals, and explored the idea that wildness and domestication appear in both.