Category: Overthrow

Kirkus interview and last day on Chicago Review’s Instagram

My novel Overthrow goes on sale today. Call or click over to your local independent bookstore and buy it!

There’s a new interview of me by James McDonald Feder in Kirkus, mostly about the perils and rewards of writing a novel that touches on contemporary issues. And today is also the last day that I’m in “residency” at the Instagram account of the Chicago Review of Books.

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Hi, this is Caleb Crain, author of "Overthrow," which comes out today from @VikingBooks, on the 6th and final day of my Instagram "residency" here at @ChicagoRevBooks. At one point in "Overthrow," a character designs a logo for the impossibly utopian group that she belongs to, and it features a flying dove and a leaping dolphin. A couple of weeks ago, on a lark, I decided to make a stamp of the logo—or rather, three stamps, in blue, green, and black ink. Here they are, individually and (when you swipe to the next photo) together. Thanks for the opportunity to present these and my earlier photos! Since I started posting them, the novel has gotten some very generous reviews. The New York Times: "A 19th-century social novel for the 21st-century surveillance state." The Boston Globe: "Legitimately great psychological fiction." The Washington Post: "'Overthrow' accomplishes its mission." I hope you'll visit your local independent bookstore and pick up a copy! –Caleb

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“Interview” magazine & the Virtual Memories Show podcast

Two new interviews! In both of which my dumbphone has a cameo.

Christopher Bollen wrote up our conversation, which is published in Interview magazine, complete with a Warholesque photo illustration: Has Caleb Crain Written the First Occupy Wall Street Novel?”

And Gil Roth edited the audio of our conversation into episode 334 of his Virtual Memories Show podcast.

I had great fun talking to both!

Chicago Instagram residency day 3: A manuscript page

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Hi, this is Caleb Crain, on day 3 of my Instagram residency for the Chicago Review of Books. I'm a Luddite, as I confessed yesterday, and I always write fiction by hand (though I always write nonfiction on a computer—sorry, I can't explain the discrepancy). Here's a photo of a page of the manuscript for my new novel, "Overthrow," which comes out on Tuesday from @VikingBooks. It's from an early scene in the book, and I admit that I chose this page because the revisions on it look so impressively elaborate. (On many other pages, the marking up isn't so rococo.) My method is that the left-hand pages are for scribbles, and the right-hand pages are where I try to write fair copy, once I think I know where I'm going. But sometimes, like here, even on the right-hand page I'm still going for a wander. I start out writing double-line-spaced, but on this page the revisions have crept into the interstitial lines that would have been empty.

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