Saturday night at ALA Midwinter. Playaway, Recorded Books, and OCLC jointly
hosted a dinner with David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and Richard Poe, narrator of the
Recorded Books audio edition (available on Playaway from Recorded Books). About 130 invited guests were on hand.
The New York Times summarizes the book as
follows: “A young mute who can
communicate with the dogs his family raises takes refuge with three of them in
the Wisconsin woods after his father’s death.”
It’s also an imaginative reworking of Hamlet (complete with mother Trudy, uncle/stepfather Claude, a
father’s ghost in the rain, etc.) You
can read the first chapter online at the New York Times website:
Some nine years in the writing, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is
Wrobelewski’s debut novel, and he envisions it as the first installment in a
trilogy. It’s been on the Times bestseller list for the past 32
weeks (currently at number five) and was a 2008 Oprah’s Book Club pick and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008.
Booklist
magazine recently chose the Recorded Books audio edition as the “Top of the
List” 2008 choice for best audiobook of 2008, and just one day before the
Saturday night event, Richard Poe was announced as one of AudioFile magazine’s 2008 Best Voices in Audiobooks.
The two guests of honor shared the stage
and took turns addressing the audience, with author Wroblewski talking about his own
upbringing in Wisconsin and how the book came to be written and introducing sections
of the story, which Richard Poe then read aloud.
Poe’s reading was so inspired and the two
complemented each other so well, that audience members were surprised to learn Wroblewski
and Poe had never met in person until earlier that day. No one I spoke with can recall ever seeing an
author and a narrator together in a single presentation of this sort, but based
on the overwhelmingly positive reaction, this is a formula we’ll certainly try
to repeat in the future.
On the exhibit floor Sunday morning, there
was much talk of the book, which I described to a few people as “Hamlet with
dogs” – but I meant it in a good-natured way.
Indeed, the topic of dogs – their prominence
in the story and in the author’s own life -- was woven throughout the evening’s
discussion. The night closed out with a lively
question-and-answer session, but the one big question NOT asked: had Wroblewski ever considered writing the
book from the point of view of a cat?
