I spent a few hours last week at Book Expo America in New York, but I won’t bore you with the details. (Any details would be boring, I’m afraid; picture a medical supplies convention, but with books.) While there, though, I discovered that there are an awful lot of promising titles coming this fall, which should mean good things for this site. One thing I missed but would have liked to catch in person was a conversation with John Irving and Richard Russo, moderated by Chip McGrath. Irving (Last Night in Twisted River) and Russo (That Old Cape Magic) both have new novels due out before long. Irving talked about his process, and I thought this was interesting:

Melville also said something that struck me when I was a young writer. He said, ‘Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.’ To appall is good. My fellow New Englander Stephen King would agree. . . . I think before I begin a novel, something about the story has to terrify me. Something about it has to be in that category of accident or tragedy that I never want to happen to myself or to anyone I love. And until I’m frightened about something, until I can’t stop thinking about something I would rather not think about, I don’t feel I have a story that I want to spend the next four or five years writing. . . . There’s a degree of repetition in most novelists I think of as serious, because we don’t so much get to choose our subjects as our obsessions choose us. There you are in what feels like the early phase of a totally new book before you realize, ‘Oh, there’s another dead child. There’s another missing parent. Oh, it’s that story again.’ And it’s not conscious. It’s obsessive.