“At his core he was nobody, and his nobodyness felt like something unforgivable.”
— Jonathan Dee
“A Thousand Pardons is that rare thing: a genuine literary thriller. Eerily suspenseful and packed with dramatic event, it also offers a trenchant, hilarious portrait of our collective longing for authenticity in these overmediated times.”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
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May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013
"It was a sad folly, he knew, to assume that even this feeling, the most powerful he could remember, wouldn’t weaken in time just like every other feeling, but for the moment he was so suffused with gratitude for living that he could not imagine ever feeling any other way."
— Jonathan Dee A Thousand Pardons (via annabelsmith)
May 23, 2013
“I mean she’s not exactly a complex figure. You can look at her and pretty much imagine what that whole relationship was like. She’s like a dog. One bit of kindness and she’s so grateful she forgets about what happened a minute ago.”
-Jonathan Dee
May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013
"A Thousand Pardons certainly reads like a book sold on a really cool twenty-word sentence…The first twenty pages has the feel of a cable TV pilot, not the opening chapter of a literary novel. I even cast it in my mind, and became half-convinced that if I could just get Alison Janney to commit to play Helen, I could have it on HBO in time for the fall season."
— Michael Bourne, “Who Are We Without Our Stories? Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons.” (via millionsmillions)
May 23, 2013
Maureen Corrigan on Jonathan Dee’s new novel, A Thousand Pardons:
Jonathan Dee likes to write about rich, good-looking people falling apart—and who among the 99% of us can’t enjoy that plot? In The Privileges, the dad of the family was a Wall Street trader, tempted by existential boredom into larceny; in A Thousand Pardons, the dad of the family is a partner in a New York law firm, tempted by existential boredom into a disastrous workplace affair. The women in Dee’s recent fiction tend to be decorative stay-at-home moms; that is, until the spontaneous combustion of hubby’s career expels them out of their silken domestic cocoons. There’s nowhere to go but down for Dee’s characters and we groundlings clap as they plummet: losing bank accounts, houses, furniture and good school systems on their descent into the economic maelstrom.
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