26 August 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

The closest I came to Dolly Parton was when the two of us were together in Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre a quarter century ago. That means we were two of the 1,200 people in the house, all there to see Dolly’s pal Reba McEntire as Annie Oakley in a revival of “Annie Get Your Gun.” My young daughter and I were seated in the first row of the balcony and Dolly Parton was seated below us in the orchestra.

Even in the audience with the lights dim, Dolly exuded that “it” quality that directors have told me they look for in a performer. Sure, Reba McEntire was fantastic and owned the stage, but Dolly owned the rest of the theater. (It’s always Dolly, isn’t it, even to those of us who would never meet her?)

My daughter was very young but already she understood that the woman in the audience below us was not merely a celebrity: she was a beloved celebrity. Everyone in the Nederlander that night felt happy to have shared a night with Dolly.

We talk of auras with a whiff of “peace-love-and-and-tie-dye” condescension, but the reality is how many celebrities don’t project an aura that is (forgive me) angelic. Oh, we watch their movies or wear their clothes or read their books, but they don’t touch our soul in the way Dolly Parton so obviously touched ours.

You can see it in the tributes the last 24 hours since she died yesterday at the age of 80. I heard a historian in tears on CNN when I was in the car yesterday. I often have a “super spin” sort of playlist on my phone to listen to when I ride my bike, and yesterday when I was bonking still 15 miles from home, I paused to create a Dolly Parton playlist to recharge my batteries. (Trust me: “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” and “9 to 5” should be on every get-up-and-go playlist.)

And while much of that aura was the result of her remarkable voice, a lot more, I think, came from the absolute comfort in which she lived within her own skin and her magnificent lack of any kind of filter. Listen to some of her interviews and you’ll see what I mean. Her quips, unrehearsed, are legendary.

She understood poverty as well as anyone, and wrote moving, unsentimental songs about it. She was a brilliant businessperson, and unlike most of the oligarchs surrounding us these days, gave so much back. Her philanthropy was well known before she died, but has dominated discussions of her death the last day.

But here, however, is something remarkable she knew on an intuitive level before so many others began to study it: books make us more empathetic. Books make us more intellectually capable of parsing life’s hardest questions. Books make us better.

And, yes, books are capable of making us happy — even now, if we can turn away for an hour or two from podcasts and TikTok. (Confession: I like both. But I also like books.)

Among Dolly’s most impressive philanthropic legacies is her Imagination Library: a foundation that gives a book to any child from brith through age five. In the 31 years it has been existence, it has given children over 332 million books.

Today, as you mourn the passing of a person so beloved that historians weep on the news, consider celebrating her with a donation to her Imagination Library. It doesn’t have to be big. My sense is that while Dolly made jokes often about the impressive size of some things, she herself wrote a poignant song about the beauty to be found in the smallest of things, in this case, a coat made from rags:

“I tried to make them see
That one is only poor

Only if they choose to be
Now I know we had no money

But I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.”

Thank you, Dolly, for always being yourself — and for teaching us all what words and reading and books can mean to the soul.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

“Bohjalian’s wonderful book is a morality tale, a snapshot of a strange, careless time in a particular slice of America, a psychological exploration of guilt and its repercussions, a portrait of a girl going off the rails — and then, because of an exciting plot twist, a courtroom drama.” — Sarah Lyall, The New York Times Book Review

(Here with novelist Deborah Goodrich Royce at her Ocean House Author Series — in a suit and holding an “amateur” ball cap.)

15 August 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

The last two weeks I’ve been on THE AMATEUR book tour.

One early morning in Manhattan, a young couple approached me in clear desperation: they had forgotten their phones on the train and were literally lost without them. They were trying to find the nearby restaurant where they were meeting relatives and were running late. I found them the address and texted the group waiting that they were almost there. (I didn’t inquire how they had both managed to lose their phones, because I was young once. At that age, I could have lost a pony in a petting zoo.)

Then three tourists asked me where to find the nearest subway entrance for a particular line. I told them.

Finally, a woman inquired if I knew where the Strand Bookstore was. I did (Of course!) and pointed them toward Broadway.

This all happened in minutes. Why was I the go-to guy for all these people? Because I was wearing a crisp suit and I was alone. In other words, I looked competent and they would be troubling only a single individual.

On the other hand, when I’m home in Vermont, I often look like that guy who back in the day was at Woodstock and still dresses the part. I’m writing this right now after returning from my Saturday morning walk with my dog, Jesse, and my jeans have three chasm-like rips in them, my M. Judson Bookstore T shirt has a coffee stain that never came out, I haven’t shaved, and my hair (the little I have) looks like Christopher Lloyd’s in “Back to the Future.” And later today, I will be wearing bike shorts and a cycling jersey that I’ve probably worn one too many times.

Yup, my lovely bride is one lucky lady.

When I’m on a book tour, however, I’m a pretty smart dresser.

And the reason I always wear a suit and tie when I speak is out of deference to my audience and my readers. If someone is going to give me some of their time, either by reading my work or listening to me speak, then I am going to show them some respect in return by dressing up.

Moreover, dressing up changes me.

There is actually a term for this: “enclothed cognition,” or the influence that clothing has on how we think about ourselves. In other words, the suits and ties, the dress shoes and the fun socks (Batman, books, and bikes) don’t just make me look competent to others. It may lead me to conduct myself a little differently and project a more confident vibe.

So, does this mean that I should start dressing up to write in the morning? Maybe. But it’s not happening, and there are two reasons why:

1) My cats and my dog are my only company when I write, and they know I respect them.

2) I don’t want to mess with my formula. Dressing up to write alone in my library might be my New Coke moment. New Coke was the disastrous reformulation of Coca-Cola in 1985 that was soon discontinued.

In any case, the next time you see me around Vermont in bike shorts or tattered jeans and a hoodie with coffee stains, feel free to ask me directions.

I may not look (or be) as competent as that guy in the suit on the book tour, but chances are I can still point you in the right direction.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

PS: Once again, my deepest thanks to the booksellers and librarians who ran the events on the tour. They were amazing. I want to thank my team at Doubleday Books for managing this madness. I want to thank all of the book review editors and book critics and book bloggers who are championing THE AMATEUR. And I want to thanks the thousands of readers who joined me. You — forgive me — “complete me.”

1. You can still get signed copies at indie bookstores across the country, and they all ship. Call one today and order yours, or pop into the store, or simply visit their websites.

2. This is the last weekend you can get the novel for 50% off at your local Barnes & Noble or bn.com. Just an FYI because inflation is a beast.

3. Thanks to all of you, THE AMATEUR was a New York Times (and Publishers Weekly and USA Today) bestseller. That will never get old, and I am grateful beyond words.

   

“Unputdownable. . . . The 26th page-turner from Chris Bohjalian, like many of its predecessors, gets its narrative pizzazz from a brilliantly-evoked time and place. . . . Expect late-breaking reveals and a big, juicy 11th-hour plot twist. . . . Masterful.”
—Marion Winik, The Boston Globe

“On one hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most polished, commercial novel yet, surpassing even The Flight Attendant in its screen-friendly elements. . . . On the other hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most psychological novel, with a first-person perspective through hubris, breakdown, and a hard-earned second chance at life.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times

“An irresistible, insightful retelling of Lolita.”
—Oprah Daily

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

9 August 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

Don O’Connell has a serious issue with Charlie Brown’s friends. He is also, just for the record, not wild about any of the reindeer but Rudolph.

“They’re bullies,” he observed of most of the Peanuts characters. “They treat Charlie Brown horribly. The only one who likes him is Linus – and that kid has serious issues.”

O’Connell was sharing his feelings with me the other day while cutting my hair, before I left on THE AMATEUR book tour. (Here is the full review of the novel in the New York Times Book Review.) He owns O’M, the hair salon on the corner of St. Paul and Main Street in Burlington, Vermont with his wife, Serena Magnan. When you have as little hair as I do, it’s really important to get it cut at a place as stylish as O’M and by a serious talent like O’Connell. A drive-in movie could use my forehead as a screen; I need all the help I can get.

“And Rudolph?” O’Connell went on, referring to the classic, stop-motion TV adaptation from 1964. “Don’t get me started. His only friend is a dentist. The world is so nasty that they put the misfits on an island. An island! And why do the reindeer treat him like dirt? Because he has a shiny nose. That’s it!”

I think any barber, stylist, or hairdresser needs to be a little eccentric. Sure, you want a professional. But you also want an edge. And O’Connell is perfect for me. I’ve known him for years through the theater community in Vermont: the Lyric Theatre and the Stowe Theatre Guild. Many Vermonters have seen him as Sky Masterson in “Guys and Dolls” (his cool façade), Seymour Krelborn in “Little Shop of Horrors” (his inner nerd), and Captain Hook in “Peter Pan” (his food for the crocodiles side).

I have no idea how O’Connell and I got around to animated and claymation bullies, but I’m glad we did. It wasn’t simply that his monologue – which in a wonderful, Jim Jefferies sort of way, bordered on rant – was funny; it was that it was smart and touched on my own childhood, much of which I used in THE AMATEUR.

Now, I was never bullied. But my family moved a lot, and I was often the new kid on the block. At one point in my life, I attended five schools in six years in three states. I think that is one of the reasons why I wound up a writer: I spent a lot of my youth as an observer, trying to understand the social mores of new and different worlds.

You can see that side of me in Kenny Foster in THE AMATEUR. (Here is the full review in the Boston Globe.)

But I did love Peanuts from an early age. After my mother dropped off my older brother at his weekly drum lesson, she would bring me to a bookstore where she would spend 35 or 40 cents on a Fawcett Crest Peanuts paperback for me: “Very Funny, Charlie Brown” or “You’re a pal, Snoopy!” I loved Peanuts for the same reason that so many generations have loved the cartoon: Charlie Brown is among the most wistful characters ever created. He’s not a complete sad sack, despite his baseball team’s won-lost record; he’s actually rather competent. But the stars seem aligned against him. Charles Schulz rarely wrote a cartoon meant to elicit a belly laugh; rather he leaves us smiling ever so slightly in recognition at the emotional brutality, heartache, and defeat that loom large in all of our lives.

I was, it seems, a pretty melancholy kid.

And that’s probably why it’s good to confront my receding hairline with a guy like Don O’Connell. Sure, we talk about his acting and my writing. We talk about our pets. But we also get to the issues that really matter, and we approach them the way a lot of men do: at the edges. Through popular culture and the memes that link generations.

The fact is, good barbers, stylists, and hairdressers don’t simply know their clients’ scalps; they know their heads, too – inside and out.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

PS: Week one of THE AMATEUR book tour is behind me and I had a blast. You can see dozens of images on all my social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, Substack, X, TikTok, etc. — all @chrisbohjalian), but I want to say four things:

1. Thank you to the dozens of booksellers and librarians who ran the events. They all were amazing. I want to thank my team at Doubleday Books for managing this madness. I want to thank all of the book review editors and book critics and book bloggers who are championing it. And I want to thanks the thousands of readers I have met or came to the first eleven events. You — forgive me — “complete me.”

2. You can still get signed copies at indie bookstores across the country, and they all ship. Call one today and order yours, or pop into the store, or simply visit their websites.

3. You can still get the novel for 50% off at your local Barnes & Noble, bn.com, or amazon. Yup, you will save $16.50 — half the price.

4. The real stars of this tour so far are, clearly, my shoes and socks. At least a dozen of you have posted pictures of my feet on the socials.

   

“Unputdownable. . . . The 26th page-turner from Chris Bohjalian, like many of its predecessors, gets its narrative pizzazz from a brilliantly-evoked time and place. . . . Expect late-breaking reveals and a big, juicy 11th-hour plot twist. . . . Masterful.”
—Marion Winik, The Boston Globe

“On one hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most polished, commercial novel yet, surpassing even The Flight Attendant in its screen-friendly elements. . . . On the other hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most psychological novel, with a first-person perspective through hubris, breakdown, and a hard-earned second chance at life.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times

“An irresistible, insightful retelling of Lolita.”
—Oprah Daily

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

4 August 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

In the photo above, I am roughly the age of Mira Winston and Kenny Foster when my new novel, THE AMATEUR, begins. (Yes, I am wearing a scarf inside, channeling either my inner Stephen Sondheim or my father whenever he’d fly north from the inferno of south Florida and visit me in northern Vermont.) They are the two main characters.

And today THE AMATEUR, my 26th novel, is on sale. Everywhere.

The tale is about one of those before-and-after moments, when the smallest of things — in this case, a golf ball and a torn thread in a practice net — changes the course of your entire life.

It’s 1978, the first Thursday in August, and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.

In the wake of this accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: in her lover, Theo Catton, a married man decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman — and, soon enough, she has traded the links for a courtroom.

I wrote this novel in an alchemic frenzy, and I saw myself — my superego and id — manifest in those two main characters.

I’m a novelist and I’m the inspiration for Mira Winston, now a writer with 26 books behind her, including one about an alcoholic flight attendant and one about a midwife on trial for manslaughter. She is finally telling her side of the story.

And, when I was a teenager, I caddied in the summer at exactly the sort of course where Kenny hefts members’ bags and follows their balls into the rough.

Kenny is my superego, that polite fellow you meet at book events and follow on the socials, often with his dog, Jesse.

Mira is my id, the prickly human who, as a teen, was often completely off the rails. I’ll never forget when of the groomsmen at my wife’s my wedding said to my mother, “Chris looks great. He doesn’t have the shakes anymore.” (In college, I lived on coffee and cigarettes and prided myself on the days I could go without sleep.) Or the time a college classmate asked me years later during the Q and A at a speech, “You still set people’s doors on fire?” (I don’t…anymore…though Mira does in THE AMATEUR.)

But I love both characters.

And I hope you do, too.

Because this time, I held nothing back.

Enjoy what I think — I hope — is the most propulsive thing I’ve ever written.

Thank you, my friends!

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

PS: Book groups — here is the Reading Group Guide!

“Unputdownable. . . . The 26th page-turner from Chris Bohjalian, like many of its predecessors, gets its narrative pizzazz from a brilliantly-evoked time and place. . . . Expect late-breaking reveals and a big, juicy 11th-hour plot twist. . . . Masterful.”
—Marion Winik, The Boston Globe

“On one hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most polished, commercial novel yet, surpassing even The Flight Attendant in its screen-friendly elements. . . . On the other hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most psychological novel, with a first-person perspective through hubris, breakdown, and a hard-earned second chance at life.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times

“An irresistible, insightful retelling of Lolita.”
—Oprah Daily

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

1 August 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

I just returned from a walk with my beloved Jesse in the woods, and it was wistful because I’m about to leave her for almost two weeks — and, as many of you know, we have been joined at the hip since February 2020.

Yes, The Amateur book tour is here. And I would bring Jesse with me if she weren’t blind, because she is much cuter than I am and a lot more lovable. And I have certainly exploited her to sell books on-line, so why not in person?

In any case, I have three “pre-launch” events — tonight, Sunday, and Monday — and then the book goes on sale everywhere on Tuesday.

I’m so grateful that among the writers joining me are the brilliant Jennifer Weiner, Jung Yun, Jenna Blum, Nancy Kricorian, Lara Prescott, and Deborah Goodrich Royce. In addition, some of our favorite book influencers will be there (including Katie Fulton), journalists (such as Lauren Maloney, Joe O’Donahue, and Catherine Shen), and (of course) booksellers you love (Barbara Peters, Michael Herrmann).

Here is a link to all the events, including how to get your tickets. Some are almost sold out, but some have plenty of seats still available.

Of course there will be swag (though no T-shirt cannons).

Now, because most of you who subscribe to this Substack actually read fiction — as we know, fewer people than ever read novels — some of you are disappointed that I am not coming to your city. Please fret not:

• I travel a lot outside of book tours. For instance, this fall I am already booked in Chattanooga, TN; Saratoga Springs, NY; and Manchester, NH. More events will follow.

• If I’m not coming to your town and you REALLY want a signed or personalized book, we can arrange it. All of the venues I’m visiting ship books, and I have signed cases and cases for the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, VT; Phoenix Books in Burlington, VT; and the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ.

• And you can also STILL preorder it right here.

In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing so many of you. But, be warned: without my Jesse, I will need all of you to be my Emotional Support Humans.

See you soon! Thank you, my friends!

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

“Unputdownable. . . . The 26th page-turner from Chris Bohjalian, like many of its predecessors, gets its narrative pizzazz from a brilliantly-evoked time and place. . . . Expect late-breaking reveals and a big, juicy 11th-hour plot twist. . . . Masterful.”
—Marion Winik, The Boston Globe

“On one hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most polished, commercial novel yet, surpassing even The Flight Attendant in its screen-friendly elements. . . . On the other hand, this may be Bohjalian’s most psychological novel, with a first-person perspective through hubris, breakdown, and a hard-earned second chance at life.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times

“An irresistible, insightful retelling of Lolita.”
—Oprah Daily

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

Photos by Victoria Blewer.

22 July 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

For nearly a quarter-century, I wrote a weekly column for Gannett’s Burlington Free Press called Idyll Banter.

One mid-summer Sunday, I wrote about the food you can find in a county or state fair — in this case, the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vermont.

It’s now high summer and the fairs are about to begin in earnest, whether you live in Vermont or Michigan or Iowa.

So, please enjoy this reprise.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

All’s Fair in Fair Food

Now here’s a sentence I never heard myself saying: “Tell me about your Famous Pork Boners.”

I was in the midst of my annual orgy of bad eating at the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vermont, deciding whether to get another helping of Fat Daddy’s mighty tasty onion rings, when I saw they were serving something called a Famous Pork Boner.

And so I asked. I had to. I’m a vegetarian and while I understand that there is no part of an animal that some people won’t eat, this was a new one for me. In this case, a Famous Pork Boner isn’t quite as bad as it sounds.

“It’s a two-ounce piece of pork shank, deep fried, and covered with our homemade barbecue sauce,” explained Tom Critchlow of Fat Daddy’s. (My wife breathed a sigh of relief, because she had noticed there was a sign for something called a Boner Platter.)

Part of the Famous Pork Boner’s appeal, I imagine, is that it’s fried. Fried food always beats out unfried food at the Champlain Valley Fair. Actually, this is true at all county fairs. (Very dedicated readers might recall that earlier this summer I enjoyed fried Oreos at the Addison County Fair and Field Days). It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to coat chocolate pudding in batter and fry it. Next year, I fully expect the sugar house will be offering deep fried maple cotton candy.

How universal is this fried-beats-unfried rule? I asked Julie Gumienny at Mr. Sausage which was the most popular: the Italian sausage, the Polish kielbasa, or the German bratwurst. To be honest, I thought this was a foreign policy question and I might inadvertently trigger an international incident. “Oh, the Italian sausage, by far,” she answered. Why? “It’s the one that’s fried.”

She also told me that it isn’t uncommon for people to order “two Italians and a large fries” to go with their Bloomin’ Onion — and then a Diet Coke. It’s the Diet Coke that always cracks her up.

I’m not judging people who consume two Italians, large fries and a Bloomin’ Onion. I’m no slouch when it comes to binge eating at the fair. I eat like Caligula.

I do, however, have the common sense to steer clear of certain rides after chowing down a Mini Cooper-sized portion of fried onion rings. Not everyone does, and the result isn’t pretty. Just ask Hairy (yes, with an “I” rather than two “R”s), the chef behind Hairy’s Famous Philly Cheesesteak at the Mojo Cafe and Grill.

The Mojo sits at a corner of the fairgrounds near such stomach-turning classic rides as the Freak Out, the Tango, and the Himalaya. There Hairy whips up his renowned shaved steak, provolone cheese, peppers and onions on a soft hoagie roll and serves it to fair patrons about to climb aboard the aforementioned rides. What happens next? “I have friends who run the rides coming over and asking me for buckets of water,” Hairy said, rolling his eyes as he envisioned the cleanup. Hairy also sells corn dogs and here, he said, is a county fair truism: “Corn dogs and rides don’t always mix.”

Somehow, we often lose complete culinary common sense at the fair. Betty Grout at Tootsie’s told me that she had someone order a slab of fried dough with chocolate sauce and then come back asking for pizza sauce to be drizzled on top of the chocolate. Michele Anderson of Dan’s Fried Dough said one customer wanted mustard on top of her cinnamon and sugar wedge. “I said to her, it’s not a pretzel,” Michele recalled.

Fingers crossed there is a county fair near you. I love them. Eat well and, if you’re as mature as I am, be sure to ask strangers where you can get a Famous Pork Boner.

* * *

PS: THE AMATEUR will be here in 13 days. If you want a copy at half-price, visit Barnes & Noble or Amazon. If you want a signed or personalized copy, visit the Vermont Book Shop or Phoenix Books. They ship. Thanks, all!

“Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. . .It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

“Irresistible. . .It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

My late father used to ask me why I go on book tours. “Do you really sell enough books to make it worth all that wear and tear on your body?” he would inquire, a father’s remarkable love leading him to believe that:

• I sell way more books than I do and, thus, don’t need to tour; and

• A book tour is more onerous than it really is.

Authors, including me, have written often about the logistical madness of the book tour – the frenetic pace, the whole notion of being “on” for weeks at a time. But the reality is that I enjoy touring. I’m energized by the opportunity to meet readers around the country and talk about books. And while I babble a whole lot about my own work, I talk a lot about what I’ve read lately.

So, beginning August 1, I am — to quote Willie Nelson — on the road again. And like his troubadour avatar, I can’t wait. This will be my 36th book tour.

And you will (finally!) meet. . .THE AMATEUR.

Among the remarkable folks joining me are Jennifer Weiner, Jung Yun, Jenna Blum, Lara Prescott, Nancy Kricorian, Deborah Goodrich Royce, and Lauren Maloney.

Here’s where you can find me in August:

Most of these events are ticketed (though not all) and you can find all the information right here.

Of course there will be swag (though no T-shirt cannons).

Now, because most of you who subscribe to this Substack actually read fiction — as we know, fewer people than ever read novels — some of you are disappointed that I am not coming to your city. Please fret not:

• I travel a lot outside of book tours. For instance, this fall I am already booked in Chattanooga, TN; Saratoga Springs, NY; and Manchester, NH. More events will follow.

• If I’m not coming to your town and you REALLY want a signed or personalized book, we can arrange it. Simply call or visit the websites for these two local Vermont bookstores before July 30 and preorder your copy:

  • The Vermont Book Shop at (802) 388-2061 or click here.

  • Phoenix Books (802) 448-3350 at or click here.

You can also preorder it right here.

My only regret? I am not bringing my beloved shadow, Jesse the Wonder Dog.

So, be warned: I will need all of you to be my Emotional Support Humans.

See you soon! Thank you, my friends!

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

“Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. . .It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

“Irresistible. . .It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

Back in the day, Vermonters often made the redcoats’ lives hell – the breakfast brawl at Hubbardton notwithstanding. But in the 1960s, my parents always had a soft spot in their hearts for one particular redcoat stationed at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York.

Okay, he wasn’t a real redcoat. He was, perhaps, a college kid on summer break earning a little money and sweating off a semester’s worth of keg beer beneath his regulation British Army uniform. But here is, more or less, what happened.

My parents had put my older brother and me in the backseat of the station wagon – a blue woodie – and driven four or five hours north from our home in Westchester County. (I should note that my brother and I probably weren’t always in the backseat. We were just as likely to have been hanging out in the cargo area. Seat belts back then were viewed as a serious inconvenience. The last thing anyone wanted was to be buckled into the seat if you smashed into a tanker truck and had to get out fast. Besides, how could my brother and I wrestle in a moving vehicle if we were strapped into our seats?) It was one of those classic summer vacation car trips, where we went north to Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, and then west to Niagara Falls.

And while I don’t remember much, I remember two moments: The redcoat. And the sex work establishment. More on the latter in a moment.

I was three and my brother was eight. Based on the photos from the trip that remain, we looked like we were pulled straight from an episode of “Mad Men:” Crew cuts and shirts buttoned to the collar. We are always posed in front of Revolutionary War era cannons. Among my annoying habits (and I had plenty), was that I used to suck my fingers. Not my thumb, which many three-year-olds depended on, but fingers. I used to suck the ring and middle fingers. Simultaneously. It drove my parents wild, and they seemed incapable of stopping me.

But one summer afternoon, the redcoat accomplished in nine words what my parents had been trying to make happen for months. For years, for all I know. As we were passing the redcoat at Fort Ticonderoga, he said to me in the voice of a drill sergeant, “Soldier! Get those fingers out of your mouth – now!” According to family lore, I was awed. I listened. And I never put my fingers in my mouth again.

The next day we motored on to Niagara Falls. Just before we arrived there, however, the station wagon’s transmission died. The woodie was towed to a garage near Buffalo and we went to the motel across the street from the garage to spend the night. It was – and here I am being kind – a dump. The fellow behind the counter begged my parents not to stay there when he saw they had their children with them. I weighed in with one of those remarks mothers memorialize in baby books: “What a crummy joint.” My mother made us sleep in our cloths on the bedspreads. (Given what we now know about motel bedspreads, this may in reality have been the far more disgusting solution. The sheets are at least washed.)

I share these two Wonder Bread memories with you because many of you are embarking upon your own summer vacations. Perhaps, they’re car trips to great destinations. Roadside adventures scheduled over the next seven weeks.

My advice? Think big. Expect the unexpected. Be flexible.

And, yes, check your transmission.

Now buckle up and take your fingers out of your mouth. It’s mid-July and those hot sheets motels fill up fast.

PS: Look for THE AMATEUR in only weeks now — or preorder today!

“Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. . .It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

“Irresistible. . .It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

Let’s begin with this: why do authors and bookstores care about preorders?

Because preorders are the publishing industry’s measure of how interested an audience is in a novel, and early buyers have a real influence on a book’s eventual success. It means the world to me that you, my most loyal readers, show up for me in this way.

Thank you!

So, I’m so pleased to be able to pass along some preorder deals.

First of all, inflation is a beast and books have not been exempt. So, you can preorder the novel at half-price right now from:

Barnes & Noble

or

Amazon.

Or you can preorder it and get it personalized or signed — with swag and the chance to win THE AMATEUR ball cap from:

The Vermont Book Shop

or

Phoenix Books.

Both stores ship.

No pressure. Of course.

Also, some new (or newish) books out now you that will devour? I loved:

— COUNTRY PEOPLE by Daniel Mason

— THE SHAMPOO EFFECT by Jenny Jackson

— SINGLE GIRLS by John Searles

— ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD by Jung Yun

— THE CHILDREN by Melissa Albert

— KIN by Tayari Jones

As always, you have my deepest thanks. Truly.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

“Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. . .It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre."
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

“Irresistible. . .It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,

Once upon a time, I vomited in front of a reading group from Illinois. When I’m with a book club, I hold back nothing.

It was a Friday afternoon and I was on my third plane of the day, this one a Dash 8 turboprop from Denver to Steamboat Springs. The next day I was joining Jacquelyn Mitchard, Andre Dubus III, and Sena Jeter Naslund for the Bud Werner Memorial Library’s annual Literary Sojourn, an all-day celebration of what words and reading and books can mean to the soul. It’s a terrific event and lots of book clubs make a pilgrimage there—including, that year, one from Illinois that was on the Dash 8 turboprop with me.

Now, I don’t mind the Dash 8. But that day I had been traveling since six in the morning in Vermont, where I live, and there was the usual Rocky Mountain clear air turbulence. The book group on the airplane recognized me instantly as one of the authors they were coming to hear, despite the fact that soon after takeoff my skin was airsickness green. And so we chatted and I sipped a Diet Coke and set the air vent above me on “wind tunnel.” Surreptitiously I kept reaching into the seat pocket, trying to find an airsickness bag amidst the magazines and Sky Mall catalogues. Somehow I had two of each, but no airsickness bag.

We talked about books as we flew to Steamboat Springs, and the unforgettable brilliance of the first sentence of Sena’s book, Ahab’s Wife: “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.” We discussed the heart that fills all of Jacquelyn’s work. And we shared the page-turning dread we’d experienced as we read Andre’s House of Sand and Fog.

At some point I reached into the pocket of the seat beside me for an airsickness bag. There wasn’t one there, either.

Looking back, I really thought I was going to make it to Steamboat Springs with my dignity intact. I fly a lot and it’s rare for me to feel like I’m going to lose my lunch. I was sure I could remain in this book group’s eyes an author they found sophisticated and charming, the sort who didn’t vomit on Dash 8 turboprops. This is called hubris—and, in hindsight, naïvete.

It was on our initial descent that we hit the bump that finally did me in. Now, I did feel it coming. And so without an airsickness bag handy, I showed an instinctive skill with origami I hadn’t known existed somewhere deep inside me: I ripped a few pages from one of the catalogs in my seat pocket, twirled them into a snow cone, and folded the bottom into a seal. Yup, somewhere around 10,000 feet in the air, I created a snow cone of vomit.

Now, here is why I am sharing this story. The reader in the book group beside me actually offered to hold my handmade Sky Mall biohazard so I could wipe my mouth and rinse with the last of my Diet Coke. So did the woman behind me. That’s support. That’s kindness. That’s the sort of heroism that is above any reader’s pay grade.

But people in book groups are like that. I’ve been talking to book groups first via speakerphone and now via platforms like Zoom since January 1999. I began because one of my events on The Law of Similars book tour was snowed out, and a reading group that was planning to attend contacted me with questions. And so we chatted via speakerphone.

I Zoom with book groups for a lot of reasons. I do it to thank them for their faith in my work. I do it because it helps me understand what makes my novels succeed aesthetically—and, yes, what makes them fail. (Book group readers share with me exactly what they think.) And I do it because it is one small way I can help novels remain relevant.

And, yes, I do it because once upon a time a book club member offered to hold my snow cone of vomit on a Dash 8.

* * *

I will be on my 36th book tour next month, this one for THE AMATEUR. Here are the 15 venues where we can meet in August. (Thank you, Doubleday Books, and thank you, bookstores.)

If I’m not coming to your town and you want a personalized book, visit the websites for the Vermont Book Shop or Phoenix Books before July 30. Not only can I personalize your book, you get the swag!

As always, you have my deepest thanks.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

PS: More on this soon. . .but I just learned that booksellers across America named THE AMATEUR an Indie Next selection for August! Color me grateful, color me honored, color me (well) euphoric. Bookstores rock; booksellers rule. Thank YOU!

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,

THE AMATEUR, my new novel, will be here in weeks now,

When you preorder your copy from my friends at Phoenix Books or the Vermont Book Shop, you can get it personalized. Or merely signed.

(Yes, they ship!)

And the first 100 people to preorder from each store will get the official golf scorecard of Mira Winston, the heroine of my new novel, with all the hazards on her golf course, including:

• Magical thinking

• That hotel in Manhattan

• Married men

• A trial for involuntary manslaughter

Moreover, everyone who preorders will be entered to win of these boss ball caps.

Again, click here to preorder:

Vermont Book Shop

Phoenix Books

Now, you need to preorder by the end of day on Thursday, July 30. Deal?

Preorders are the publishing industry’s measure of how interested an audience is in a novel, and those early buyers have a real influence on a book’s eventual success. It means the world to me that you, my most loyal readers, show up for me in these ways and I’m so deeply grateful to Phoenix Books and the Vermont Book Shop.

Also? I just finished reading three new books, and each was fantastic. Please add them to your TBR piles, because they are remarkable.

1. Andrew Sean Greer’s VILLA COCO

2. Jung Yun’s ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD

3. Lena Dunham’s FAMESICK

As always, you have my deepest thanks.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

My father has been gone for over a decade, but the Sunday after he died, I wrote about his last day for a newspaper column I penned weekly back then.

I share it again here.

Happy Father’s Day, my friends.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

* * *

Terribly sudden, but not terribly sad.

In the last half year, I have found myself eulogizing in this space my mother-in-law, my godfather, and my good friend, John Vautier. Now we can add to this illustrious pantheon, my father, Aram “Bo” Bohjalian. He died last week at 83, passing away in a fashion eerily similar to my mother-in-law this spring: A burst blood vessel in the brain in the still of the night. I have made it clear to my friends and family that I would prefer that they not die for a while, if only so I can resume writing about things that really matter, such as my cats’ turd hockey team and fried dough at the Champlain Valley Fair.

The truth is, I was never shy about writing about my father, because he was always good copy. He was a loving dad and a wonderful friend, but he was also worth chronicling: There was something universally poignant about his last years that lent itself to examination, and the way that he and his girlfriend and golf buddies in Florida endured the indignities that come with age.

Moreover, his will to live was ferocious. This was a guy who had had Crohn’s Disease since 1973, a bad ticker, high blood pressure, macular degeneration, a pair of 83-year-old ears, and a short-term memory that was about as sharp as a butter knife. (His long-term memory, like that of many seniors, remained impressive: Ask him about a Great Shakes television commercial he filmed in 1965, and he would give you an answer the length of a History Channel documentary.) He was frail and walked slowly, resistant to the very end to the idea of a walker.

And while his life had its share of disappointments, his last full day on this earth was weirdly perfect. The day before the night when his brain would be drowned in a tsunami of blood was an unexpected gift.

My teenage daughter, Grace, and a friend of hers had joined me in Fort Lauderdale to visit him that week. They would spend their days at the beach and catch up with my father and me late afternoon.

On my father’s last full day, the two of us went shopping for shoes, because we agreed that his footwear lacked style. At Macy’s we found him some loafers with a serious “Miami Vice” vibe, and he was thrilled. Then we went to see one of the 7 million doctors who kept him vertical. Actually, we saw his favorite physician, Steven Hahn. My dad had known Steven for years. Like so many of the people in my father’s life, years earlier their relationship had transcended even the friendliest doctor-patient relationship. (The next day, after my father had died, one of Steven’s assistants said she had known in her heart — and she thought my dad had, too — that they were never going to see each other again and he had come over to say goodbye.)

Then my dad and I drove to a tony strip of Fort Lauderdale called Las Olas Boulevard and an Italian restaurant he liked, where we met Grace and her friend and my dad’s girlfriend and her grown daughter, who was visiting from Texas.

As we approached Las Olas, I joked about my notoriously bad sense of direction. “Proud of me?” I said. “I got us here without getting us lost.”

“Son,” he said. “I am always proud of you. Always.”

We polished off a bottle of Chianti and my father regaled Grace with stories of what college had been like for him as a military veteran in the late 1940s.

About 9 at night, we said goodnight to him at his apartment at the assisted living facility where he lived. Four hours later, a night nurse found him on his living room floor, breathing but unresponsive, and 14 hours after that he died in the hospital.

In theory, he had almost no brain function left when he passed away. But a little before three in the afternoon his blood pressure was solid and he was breathing on his own. And so his girlfriend took his hand and whispered, “Bo, you’ve always been so strong. You don’t have to be strong forever. Let go, honey, let go.”

And so he did. His blood pressure dropped like a stone and he was dead within minutes. The end was terribly sudden. But it wasn’t terribly sad.

I’m confident that my father has now been reunited with my mother and those golf buddies you’ve read about all these years. Once again Bernie and Saul and Bo are teeing off somewhere in heaven, the fairways groomed and the putting greens true, and the only pain is that damned sand trap on 17.

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

Inflation is a beast and books have not been exempt.

So, color me grateful that bn.com is offering my forthcoming book, THE AMATEUR — a novel that both Publishers Weekly and CrimeReads called “a masterpiece,” and Kirkus called “a perfect novel” — at 50% off during this special promotional period.

Preorders are the publishing industry’s measure of how interested an audience is in a novel, and those early buyers have a real influence on a book’s eventual success. It means the world to me that you, my most loyal readers, show up for me in these ways and I’m so pleased to be able to pass along this discount offer to you.

THE AMATEUR obsessed me in ways almost none of my previous books have. In the summer of 2024 — to paraphrase Joseph Heller — something happened. I heard that narrative voice that fuels a novel, and I told no one what I was writing.

Moreover, it was actually voices (plural) I was hearing, including some of the entitled men for whom I would caddy at a swank country club in Westchester as a teenager.

The narrator was a female version of me, a novelist with a lot of books behind her who is finally letting loose — telling it like it is, because, pure and simple, it’s time for a reckoning. For the truth.

And what is obsessing her? How one August afternoon in 1978, when she was 18 years old, she drove a golf ball through a practice net at her tony country club in a New York City suburb, hitting a classmate and caddy in the temple and killing him almost instantly.

There I am, both the narrator and the caddy — the instrument of death and the dead.

I wrote the novel in a 90-day frenzy, working some days from the moment I returned from walking my beloved dog, Jesse, at daybreak until it was time to prepare or enjoy dinner.

As I worked, I kept coming back to this question: what if one weird, wild, and tragic accident changed your life in ways you could never come back from?

And, suddenly, there were secret affairs, predatory men, the class divide in America. . .and a teenage girl on trial for involuntary manslaughter.

You can meet THE AMATEUR soon — and preorder your copy at half-price today from Barnes & Noble.

As always, you have my deepest thanks. Truly.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

Chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of "The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.”

Chosen by Oprah’s Book Club as one of “Six Stories That’ll Set the Tone for the Summer"

“Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. . .It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling. . . . A prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre."
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

"The Amateur is a joyous novel with an unforgettable narrator who will break your heart. It is sharply funny, beautifully told and so moving on the way life can upend itself in a single moment. I adored it."
—Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country

“Irresistible. . .It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Unputdownable.”

—The Boston Globe

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,

This week new novels arrived from Maggie O’Farrell (LAND), Ann Patchett (WHISTLER), and Courtney Baum (ALAN OPTS OUT).

I’m going to read all three, and I am especially excited about ALAN OPTS OUT, because as a person who spent a decade in advertising, I’m all-in for any novel about a “mad man” who walks away from the madness.

Now, below are new or almost new or soon-to-be-new books I devoured — and can recommend for your beach bags and nightstands. After all, every nightstand TBR book pile should be a skyscraper

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

* * *

THE SHAMPOO EFFECT by Jenny Jackson (on sale June 30). THE SHAMPOO EFFECT is one of the smartest, funniest, and most astute novels I’ve ever read about that liminal period when we’re supposed to be responsible parents of small children, but still close enough to our own adolescence that we pine for the teenage freedoms we’d once taken for granted. An aspiring novelist, the single Caroline Lash, is savoring a fellowship to write her first book on a coastal village north of Boston, and there becomes part of a posse of thirty-something parents (and soon-to-be parents), a group that has been bonded together since they were teens. But as everyone walks that tightrope between being grownups -- raising Pokemon-obsessed children and paying the mortgage and trying to be present for their partners -- and the leisurely hedonism they’d all once enjoyed, this new interloper inadvertently upsets the status quo that has kept the peace. Unexpected pregnancies, marital revelations, sibling rivalries, emotional (and actual) infidelities. . .and all of it presented by Jenny Jackson with a combination of great humor and profound wistfulness. I loved this novel. You will, too.

BRAWLER, by Lauren Groff (on sale now). I first fell in love with Lauren Groff's fiction with her magnificent novel, FATES AND FURIES. I've been hooked ever since. Nevertheless, despite having read all her novels and all her short story collections, I was unprepared for how much the tales in BRAWLER would surprise me, move me, or, best of all, haunt me. The nine tales in it are unpredictable. Some will leave you nodding at a child or teen's capacity for cruelty ("Such Small Islands" or "Birdie"), other's at the wonder inside any human heart ("To Sunland" or "What's the Time, Mr. Wolf?"). It's a poignant, beautiful, always unsettling collection, up there with the very best of Lorrie Moore, Flannery O'Connor, and Karen Russell.

CALLER UNKNOWN, by Gillian McAllister (on sale now). I devoured CALLER UNKNOWN, which will surprise no one given that I have loved all of Gillian McAllister's novels I've read. CALLER UNKNOWN is particularly gripping because it's a tale of a kidnapped teenage girl, and how her mother goes nearly full-on "Breaking Bad" to try and rescue her. It moves between Texas and Mexico, and there are drug mule moments that make "Euphoria" look tame. But its beating heart is not merely dread -- which I love. It's also a deeply moving mother/daughter love story (which I love, too), and the lengths to which a parent will go for a child. You'll be hooked.

THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY, by Elizabeth Strout (on sale now). THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY is a devastating book: devastatingly beautiful, devastatingly smart, and devastatingly kind. Meet Artie Dam, revered high school history teacher in a Boston suburb in 2024, who is just starting to lose his grip. His grown son's marriage is unraveling, his relationship with his own wife has gotten strangely prickly, and some of his students in this post-Covid world have become brittle. Moreover, if he is not clinically depressed, he is beginning to find suicide an increasingly attractive siren. He and his wife and their son are all harboring secrets, things they never say. This novel precisely, beautifully, and with unexpected power captures the fragility within all of us. And that last act? Moving (even gutting), harrowing, and spot-on. As always, Elizabeth Strout really sticks the landing. (Also? I want all of us to start wearing T shirts that say things like, “I stand with Artie Dam,” or “Danny Marino ain’t just a jock,” or “Let’s get to work!” Or, perhaps, a ball cap that says, “I keep my F-U’s here.”)

VILLA COCO, by Andrew Sean Greer (on sale June 9). Tuscany — Disney World for grownups — has never been more delightfully, wildly, sometimes hilariously eccentric. A young man, our hero, is sent to the Tuscan estate of an ageless Baronessa (she’s ninety-two, but has the carriage of a much younger woman) to “catalog” her art and items that she insists are art. And amidst the wine, the clothes, the “machina,” the wildlife, her friends, his new friends. . .well, hijinks ensue. It’s a treasure.

COUNTRY PEOPLE, by Daniel Mason (on sale July 7). I’ve been a tremendous fan of Daniel Mason’s work since I devoured THE WINTER SOLDIER. His latest, COUNTRY PEOPLE, has all the elements of his fiction, especially the masterpiece, NORTH WOODS, that I have come to love: a sly sense of whimsy, astute insights into the human soul, remarkable animals, wonder at the natural (and unnatural) world, and sentences that are rhythmically perfect. In COUNTRY PEOPLE, two professors and their children (and their dog), move from California to my beloved Vermont, and there they meet …well… country people. Chaos ensues. Craziness abounds. And it is not merely a delightful romp, it’s one of those life-affirming stories that will leave you ebullient and joyful when you finish.

YESTERYEAR, by Caro Claire Burke (on sale now). Meet Natalie Heller Mills, trad wife and Instagram influencer, star of her renowned Yesteryear Ranch, where women are women, men are men, the children are always adorable, and the values are "traditional." Conservative beyond MAGA, if that's possible, and everyone seems to live as if it's the 1880s, except the kitchen appliances are modern and (yes) spectacular. And then, much to Natalie Heller Mills's horror, she is seemingly catapulted back to the 1880s -- so, no magnificent kitchen appliances. Or indoor plumbing. Or electricity. Or nannies and content producers. Or bazillions of Instagram followers. And we're off on a novel that is increasingly dark (but still, often, very funny), as one of the most wondrously unhinged narrators you will meet in 2026 tries to navigate a genuinely traditional world without losing her mind. Unless, of course, she already has. . .

POLLOCK’S LAST LOVER, by Stephen P. Kiernan (on sale now). It was the Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe who first said, “History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.” There's a lot of truth to that, and it explains why we love to read historical fiction -- and why I devoured Stephen Kiernan's, POLLOCK'S LAST LOVER. We all know a little about Jackson Pollock and we all know a bit about the insane prices that some paintings go for in auction (including Pollock's). The wonder and beauty of a novel like this is the remarkable ways you feel (REALLY feel) what the painters, their spouses, the art house detectives, and (yes) their lovers might have experienced -- first in the 1950s, when the work is being created, and then sixty years later, when one painting may (or may not) come to auction. Is it a real Pollock or a clever forgery? Is the woman attempting to sell it who claims to be Pollock's last lover an elderly grifter or, indeed, the one witness to the painting's creation? It's riveting, all of it: the madness of a painter losing his grip, his inamorata who may never have had a grip to begin with, and the increasing desperation of one art house investigator who realizes she may have on her hands a painting worth $50 million -- or a forgery that may cost her a career. This book is an absolute gem. I loved it.

SINGLE GIRLS, by John Searles (on sale July 7). Devoured this funny, moving, and seriously inspiring novel in two nights. John Searles, who spent years as an editor at Cosmopolitan, has brought back to life Helen Gurley Brown, the editor (and, yes, visionary) who resurrected the magazine from the dead in the 1960s and revolutionized what a magazine could be for young women. But it's not merely a reimagining of Brown's remarkable life: it's a time machine back to the 1960s when -- perhaps for the first time -- "single girls" could walk with pride and be themselves, instead of merely "someone's wife" or "someone's mom." Bonus? Toward the end of this lovely novel are four pages of Cosmo "pitch" ideas to see if the magazine is for you. It's one of those Easter eggs that will leave you nodding and smiling.

KIN, by Tayari Jones (on sale now). I listened to this poignant, powerful, inspiring novel about two sisters and the fierce aunt who raises them on audio, often while walking my dog, and was either offering my pup the sounds of quite the ugly cry alone in the woods, or I would simply have to stop and absorb the remarkable rhythm of Jones’s magnificent sentences. This is among the most emotionally resonant novels that will be published this year. A gem.

FIVE, by Ilona Bannister (on sale now). Ilona Bannister has written a riveting, ticking time bomb of a novel. Five is brilliant: a gripping tour de force about destiny and choice—and, yes, an oncoming train. I devoured it. You will, too.

GO GENTLE, by Maria Semple (on sale now). The Stoics aren't obvious fodder for comedy, but Maria Semple isn't your average comic novelist. Her novels have moments of laugh-out-loud brilliance, not surprising given her time spent on the magnificent TV series, "Arrested Development," but there is also an undercurrent of wistfulness and inchoate unease in her work. Such is the case with her welcome new novel, "Go Gentle," the title a reference to the Dylan Thomas poem in which he urges us not to go quietly, but to rage "against the dying of the light." The novel revolves around Adora Hazard, a bestselling philosopher who helps people try and live a serene life by following the wisdom of the Greek stoics. She has a teen daughter, female friends in her West Side apartment complex -- her self-proclaimed coven -- and two young kids she tutors who come from a family with more money than small nations. Life is calm, a little dull, until. . .she may have come across a dangerous arms deal and a peculiar Greek statue. And the screwball pyrotechnics commence. It's a delight -- but Semple is so smart that she never lets us forget the human stakes, and the real reason (which is devastating) behind our philosopher's tattoo.

LAKE EFFECT, by Cynthia Sweeney (on sale now). Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney is a rarity: a novelist who has both a profound understanding of the hopes and fears that power the human heart AND spectacular comedic timing. I loved this novel: it was, in countless ways, the perfect novel for me. Two close families are dramatically changed in 1978 when the husband of one and the wife of the other realize how deeply and madly in love they are, leading to -- super shock in Rochester, NY in 1978 -- two divorces in one tony neighborhood. The four adults, their four children, are both complex and -- again, super shock, given how usually my jam is dread -- likable. I adored them all, and savored watching how these two divorces would change everything (including the high school production of "Godspell"). Also, wow, did D'Aprix Sweeeney stick the landing. I went from laughing at a daughter changing the size tags of a dress in a department store to accommodate her mother's self-delusion, to weeping at the ways even the most imperfect families can sometimes figure it all out. Just a banger of a book.

RUBY FALLS, by Gin Phillips (on sale now). I have been a tremendous fan of Gin Phillips since being riveted by her brilliant 2017 novel, "Fierce Kingdom" -- a magnificent, terrifying novel about a mother and child trapped in a zoo WITH ACTIVE SHOOTERS after dark. Well, I loved "Ruby Falls," her brand new novel, even more. It's Depression-era Tennessee and a psychic is going to find a hairpin hidden somewhere deep in a cave as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the struggling tourist attraction and natural wonder, Ruby Falls: a waterfall 150 underground and its nearby aboveground restaurant. Over the course of a day (and then into the night and the small hours of the morning), six people will traverse those caves, claustrophobic passageways, and slender tunnels, always in the dark, often lost. And watching over them from a distance are two experienced cavers. And since we know from the bats and spiders and millipedes and ants we meet on the first page that at least one of this group is dead -- his corpse is their "banquet" -- the tension is exquisite.

THE GATEPOST, by Tim Weed (on sale now). Yes, another cave — or a portal. Shamanism, psilocybin mushrooms, Vermont and a father who has disappeared. Is his daughter, Esme Weatherhead mad for, almost literally, going down this rabbit hole? Addictive in all the best ways.

Okay, remember I began this note by telling you that I worked for a decade in advertising? I would be derelict if I did not mention one more book.

Mine.

(Forgive me, forgive me!)

THE AMATEUR arrives in less than two months now (August 4) and you can preorder it wherever you buy your books — and, trust me, preorders matter to a book’s success. Rather than me telling you about THE AMATEUR, I’ll let others. (You can also watch the “book trailer” at the very end of this newsletter.)

Chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of “The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.”

Chosen by Oprah’s Book Club as one of “Six Stories That’ll Set the Tone for the Summer.”

Chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the 75 Books of the Summer.

“Styled as an unflinchingly candid memoir written by Mira decades after the fact, Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. Plentiful foreshadowing ramps up tension and keeps the momentum high while Mira turns over weighty subjects—sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress, familial dysfunction—with grace and wry humor. It’s a masterpiece.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Irresistible… a marvelous 11th-hour twist and a satisfying denouement lie ahead. It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Intrepid . . . Timely and empathic.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

“Bohjalian delivers again with this suspenseful novel. . . . Provocative. . . . An engrossing read that will offer much discussion for book clubs.”
—Library Journal

“An irresistible, insightful retelling of Lolita.”
—Marion Winik, Oprah Daily

“The Amateur is a joyous novel with an unforgettable narrator who will break your heart. It is sharply funny, beautifully told and so moving on the way life can upend itself in a single moment. I adored it.”
—Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country

“Unputdownable.”
—The Boston Globe

“Chris Bohjalian’s latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece. I cannot praise this novel enough. It’s delicate, haunting, complex, and startling; a wide-ranging condemnation of polite society disguised as a character study and comedy of manners. And in addition to all The Amateur‘s literary feats, the novel also happens to make golf seem…kinda interesting? Which is obviously the novel’s most difficult achievement. In case you want to know what the book’s actually about: The Amateur begins with a shocking death, as a budding golf pro hits a ball through a hole in a net and hits a caddy in the head, instantly killing him. What follows is an odyssey of self-recrimination and terrible truths, a prescient reminder that those who feel most inclined towards guilt are often the least deserving of blame. The Amateur is a standout stunner of a story, and the perfect gateway into Bohjalian’s substantial literary oeuvre.”
—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,

This short essay ran originally the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend in 2009 in my weekly column in the Burlington Free Press. I updated it ever so slightly and hope it has resonance for all of you.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

* * *

By Friday morning, the dandelions had started to look a little ragged even here in the hills of Lincoln, Vermont, where spring comes late. But they were still a first-rate option to drop on a grave if you were 6 or 7 years old and wanted to show your respect for the dead. The kids found them as they walked from the Lincoln Elementary School on the east side of the village to the cemetery on the west.

It’s a tradition. Every year on the Friday before Memorial Day, the entire school — all six grades and the kindergarten — walk together down East River Road and up Quaker Street to the graveyard. Including the teachers and administrators and a couple of parents, this year there were about 140 people.

The teachers had explained why everyone was taking time off from math or spelling that morning to visit the cemetery. The kids knew the holiday was important enough that they wouldn’t be going to school Monday, and they understood that the day has a gravity that transcends the first barbecue of the summer. After all, on Monday there will also be a small parade not far from their homes. But still it remains one of those mystifying days off from the classroom that doesn’t come with presents.

And, of course, Friday they all went to the cemetery. That’s serious.

Their teachers may also have told them how Memorial Day originally was called Decoration Day. Its origins go back to the Civil War. In 1868, three years after the conflict had ended, General John Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, wanted a day to remember the soldiers who had died putting down the rebellion: “The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land.”

The actual Civil War seems like ancient history, but we know it’s not: we are still in many ways a divided nation, our differences exacerbated by social media, echo chambers, and our unwillingness to learn from or even acknowledge our history. Too many political leaders would rather erase or rewrite our history than confront it, diminishing the sacrifice of so many Americans and diluting the meaning of a moment like Memorial Day.

But the Lincoln cemetery still has a few poles in the ground with rusted metal stars with the letters G.A.R. upon them. G.A.R. stands for Grand Army of the Republic. Finding one of those stars always gives a child enormous satisfaction, because it means that he or she has just discovered the gravesite of a Civil War veteran.

And, perhaps, some others found a grandmother’s grave. Or stumbled across an uncle’s. Or that nice old lady who used to give out really good candy on Halloween.

Halloween. Now there’s a holiday kids can wrap their minds around.

Still, as they walked among the tombstones the meaning of Memorial Day became tangible — or at least as tangible as a day about something as intangible as memory can be. Sure, it was a holiday that began as a way to pay tribute to soldiers who died over a century and a half ago, but sadly there have been soldiers who have died in an awful lot of wars ever since. Some of them are buried in this cemetery, too.

One time I watched a few of the young students stand solemnly before the marker for a first lieutenant in an air cavalry division who died on a sweltering July day in 1968 while leading a patrol in Vietnam. A few minutes later they were inhaling the aroma of the freshly cut grass as they paused before another marker, this one with a name that is common in Lincoln but not someone they ever knew. My sense in both cases is that the students were moved because — and here is something they hadn’t expected and rarely know how to put into words — they felt a connection. That’s the thing about cemeteries and about this Lincoln tradition.

Over the years I have seen these kids carefully place their small bouquets of dandelions on the graves and every year — at just that moment — the world around them seems to grow quiet.

As it should.

* * *

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 26 books. His new novel, The Amateur, arrives this summer.

Happy Friday, my friends,

It’s here -- the first video preview of THE AMATEUR!

I wrote this novel in an alchemic frenzy, and I’m still gobsmacked by the idea Publishers Weekly called it “a masterpiece” and the New York Times chose it as one of “the novels everyone will be talking about in 2026.” If you like what you see, please consider preordering THE AMATEUR wherever you buy books, or click here to learn even more.

Also? I just finished reading three new novels, and each was fantastic. Please add them to your TBR piles, because they are remarkable. You can read my reviews on Goodreads.

1. Elizabeth Strout’s THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY

2. Gillian McAllister’s UNKNOWN CALLER

3. Maria Semple’s GO GENTLE

As always, you have my deepest thanks.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

In all fairness, I’m not sure my mother viewed either book as an “investment.” They just happened to be first editions because my mother was a voracious reader and bought both novels soon after they were published. Nevertheless, she made it clear when I shared my work with her that she would prefer that I didn’t use book covers as coloring books in the future.

She had, in hindsight, an impressive library, and when I was a boy the books sat in long rows of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that one of my father’s best friends, Bob George, built against the dark wood paneling of our family room. And it was an eclectic collection: Alongside the Saul Bellows and the Philip Roths, there were a lot of books that were seriously steamy. We’re not talking handcuffs-on-the-cover steamy, but plenty of passages that I couldn’t wait to share with my friends. Exhibit A? Xavier Hollander’s “The Happy Hooker.” Exhibit B? Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather.”

Today is Mother’s Day, but I think about my mother’s library often. Some of my recent novels and plays have focused on select moments from my childhood, and I’ve found myself flashing back to my boyhood – and realizing, in some way, why I write books in the first place. My father always believed that my mother was instrumental in my brother and me becoming such avid readers because she was always reading and sharing her love of fiction with us.

But here is one footnote to that story I particularly love: it was my blond, blue-eyed Swedish mother – not my Armenian father – who first tried to connect me to my Armenian literary ancestry. Over the years, she encouraged me to read a lot of books, but among them were “My Name is Aram,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Saroyan’s tales of growing up amidst the Armenian community of Fresno, California; “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” Franz Werfel’s magisterial epic of the 4,000 Armenians who held off the Turkish Army in the first summer of the Armenian Genocide; and Michael Arlen’s memoir of his reconnection with his Armenian heritage, “Passage to Ararat” – a winner of the National Book Award.

My mother died when I was a much younger man and struggling sometimes mightily and sometimes pathetically to carve out a career as a writer. Given that she was an astute reader, she must have realized that my earliest books were utter train wrecks. Even a mother’s love couldn’t have made her blind to the disaster that was my “apprentice” work. Here is the first sentence from my first published novel: “Lisa Stone slept curled in a ball, a grown woman rolled on her side into a croissant.”

But she kept giving me or suggesting books. Certainly part of the reason was simply that we both loved to read. But she also knew that I loved to write. Looking back, my sense is that many of the books she gave me were presents born somewhere in that foggy intersection between inspiration and hope. They were a mother’s love made manifest in pulp and ink and glue.

Which is, of course, one of the many things that good mothers do. They prod and they pray and they hope. They are encouraging; they are the last to give up. I had one of those moms. My daughter does now.

Happy Mother’s Day.

6 May 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

For years I’ve told people the only reason golf was invented was so that men would talk to each other. Arguably, this could be said of most sports, but a round of golf is an especially perfect place for uptight men to converse: you spend hours staring straight ahead as you walk. There’s no eye contact to muddy up those awkward revelations or stifle those uncomfortable emotions.

I caddied for summers in high school, and so I saw up close and personal how golf is conducive to candor in ways that tennis and basketball and (dear God) pickleball are not.

If history is a guide, I will be sharing again this summer my half-serious theory about why golf was invented, because I’ll be on a book tour. And when I’m on a book tour, invariably I am asked the following questions:

“Why did you make the narrator of Midwives the midwife’s daughter and not, I don’t know, the midwife’s son?”

“Why did you make your flight attendant in The Flight Attendant a woman?”

“Why is your narrator in The Sandcastle Girls female?”

I will also receive some version of this compliment:

“You and Wally Lamb and Stephen King are men who write women well. Lots of men don’t, you know.”

These questions and compliments are built on one of two premises: either male novelists should not write books with female protagonists or it’s fine, but most of us (meaning male novelists) aren’t exactly sticking the landing.

Obviously, given my publishing history, I believe it’s fine for men to write women, just as I believe it’s fine for women to write men. Imagine a world in which we could only write about ourselves: it would be small indeed.

And it’s clear that readers have noticed over the last thirty years that the characters giving voice to my stories tend to be female. So, I am going to respond to that question I’ve been asked a thousand times and, if I live long enough, will be asked a thousand times more.

“Why are so many of your protagonists and narrators women?”

Answer? Because the stories that interest me demand an emotional openness that a lot of men of my generation lack. To wit: I didn’t cry for easily five decades. Even when eulogizing my mother when I was in my mid-thirties, I offered a tight 28-minute stand-up set that was worthy of a Netflix comedy special. (I’d say I killed it, but it was a memorial service and it’s hard not to, um, kill it at a memorial service.)

The first time I wrote from a female perspective was my fifth novel, Midwives, which is narrated by Connie Danforth, a young ob-gyn and midwife’s daughter. I told myself that if it felt inauthentic 50 pages in, I would scrap the perspective and approach the story from the vantage point of a male character.

But everything about it felt right and I had more fun writing it than I had writing any of my previous novels.

Moreover, all of my books are awash in autobiographic minutiae, and there is a freedom that comes with writing a character that nobody will assume is you. I’ve always revealed a lot about myself, especially my demons, in my books. It’s dread that often fuels my fiction and keeps you turning the pages, and it’s easier to set free the dragons that dog me if my protagonists and narrators don’t seem to be me.

And I think the journeys on which I set my characters demand the sort of emotional courage and openness that makes a lot of men — including, apparently, yours truly — deeply uncomfortable.

Perhaps in no novel have I transmogrified my actual life experiences from male to female more than in my next book, this summer’s The Amateur.

The narrator is clearly a female version of me, a novelist with a lot of books behind her who is finally letting loose — telling it like it is, because, pure and simple, it’s time for a reckoning. For the truth.

And what is it that’s obsessing her? How one August afternoon in 1978, when she was 18 years old, she drove a golf ball through a practice net at her tony country club in a New York City suburb, hitting a classmate and caddy in the temple and killing him almost instantly.

Remember, I was a caddy — and it was at exactly that sort of swank country club in Westchester County.

So, there I am, both the narrator and the caddy — the instrument of death and the dead.

As I worked, I kept coming back to this question: what if one weird, wild, and tragic accident changed your life in ways you could never come back from?

And, suddenly, there were secret affairs, predatory men, the class divide in America. . .and a teenage girl on trial for involuntary manslaughter.

When I started this new book, I never anticipated it would become:

— A courtroom drama;

— A novel of suspense;

— A page turner with (I hope) a wry sense of humor;

— A book with very good jokes about very bad parenting.

But it was, perhaps, inevitable that when it was time for me to really cut loose, to tell the most important story of my career, it would begin on a golf course — where even the seriously uptight among us will stare straight down that long, green fairway and let down their guard.

THE AMATEUR arrives August 4 in the United States.

You can find it August 20 in the United Kingdom. (And don’t you love the UK cover, too?)

You can preorder it today wherever you buy books and in whatever format you like. Use this link in the U.S. and this one in the UK.

If you want personalized copies, simply reach out to:

• The Vermont Book Shop at (802) 388-2061 or click here.

• Phoenix Books at (802) 448-3350 or click here.

In the meantime? As always, thank you for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

A photo I took of the remains of St. Bartholomew, an Armenian church in eastern Turkey near the Iranian border.

21 April 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

“But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”

That may be the most quoted paragraph from my 2012 novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” a love story set amidst the Armenian Genocide.

I share it this week because Friday, April 24, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the day when Armenians commemorate the Ottoman Empire’s systematic annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians, 300 thousand Assyrians, and countless Greeks between 1915 and 1923. Virtually all of modern Turkey was ethnically cleansed of its Armenian communities.

Given the political, military, and judicial horrors occurring daily around the world right now, why should we care about a genocide that began 111 years ago and involves a diasporan people, most of whom are largely assimilated into nations as different as the United States, Russia, Lebanon, and France?

Because the Armenian Genocide is, in fact, one reason why we even have the word “genocide,” the term coined by Polish jurist Rapheal Lemkin to convey the magnitude of the carnage. It means, essentially, “race killing.” The Armenian slaughter and displacement inspired the Nazis, first with their “race laws” and then with their “final solution.” As scholar Stefan Ihrig argues in Justifying Genocide, the Armenian Genocide did not directly cause the Holocaust, but the German presence in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the Young Nazis’ veneration for the Young Turks made it more likely. The goal of both that Ottoman government and Hitler’s Germany were the creations of what those in power deemed ethnically pure nations.

And now, in 2026, we see a United States government trying to disenfranchise some minority groups, deport some immigrants, and eliminate birthright citizenship with that same objective: a heterogenous, largely Christian, predominantly white America. How unabashedly nativist is the decade-old “Make America Great Again” movement? A 2022 study out of the University of Massachusetts indicated that one out of three Americans believed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, a paranoid theory that a cabal of elected officials wants to recruit people of color from other countries to come here and make the nation “less white.” These believers fear that the presence of these minorities diminishes the United States culturally, politically, and economically.

What I find most striking, however, about the way governments create hostility toward a minority people is how quickly the slurs of the powerful become policy and then policy becomes murder. It begins with aspersions on the character of the minority populace, and, in the case of first the Armenians and then the Jews, blaming them for economic woes or military failures with which they had absolutely no involvement.

And hate-speak begets violence. Always has, always will. Think of the vocabulary the Ottomans used to rationalize the killing of my Armenian ancestors (microbes, disgusting, duplicitous, deceitful), and Hitler and his allies used a generation later to demonize the Jewish citizens of Europe (rats, vermin, vultures).

And, alas, demonizing a minority worked in 1915 to help the Ottoman Turks stave off rebellion after years of economic decline and years of military setbacks, and it helped the Nazis to wrest control of Germany from the Weimar Republic in 1933, and then secure their grip on power in the 1930’s. And it was important to the growth of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

Hate sells. Hate unifies.

We Armenians chose April 24 to memorialize the dead and recall our lost homeland in the eastern half of Turkey because that was the date in 1915 when the Ottoman Turkish leadership rounded up the Armenian business, intellectual, and religious leaders in Constantinople, almost all of whom would be dead by the summer. Critical to a tyrannical government’s success is silencing the language of dissent and replacing it with the language of its own agenda. This was why it was so important to the Ottoman government on April 24, 1915 to first eliminate the Armenian leaders of Constantinople – the voice of the Armenians.

And perhaps that’s why on April 24, 2026 I find myself looking as much at the present as I am at the past. There is, arguably, a link between insisting that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and declaring “America is for Americans and Americans only,” and then not merely ordering ICE to round up suspected illegal aliens but (yes) to insist that the American citizens legally protesting were “domestic terrorists” (and, in some cases, shooting them).

Ethnic cleansing, a euphemism itself, begins with language.

And these days, the language of genocide is everywhere.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

The Marquis Theatre in Middlebury, Vermont. (Photo courtesy of the cinema.)

25 March 2026

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

So far this year, my lovely bride and I have been to the movie theater six times.

We saw (my opinion) brilliant adaptations of beloved novels such as “Hamnet” and “Project Hail Mary,” and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s magnificent re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (and the 1935 movie it spawned), “The Bride.”

I mention this not as a humble brag or as misguided virtue-signaling. (“Look at us, look at us, we’re old school and still love to go out to the cinema!”)

But the truth is, right now Hollywood is beleaguered:

1. Lots of folks stopped going to the theater during the pandemic and never went back. Habits change.

2. We stream movies at home. Moreover, original TV programming has never been better, and we’re in a wonderful golden age of television.

3. The industry is consolidating.

4. Home entertainment systems and TVs have magnificent picture and sound quality.

So, why do so many of my wife’s and my “date nights” involve going out to the movies?

The answer is both one particular theater (the cinema “model”) and the more universal experience of savoring a movie as part of a small community.

That theater is the Marquis in Middlebury, Vermont. The Marquis is different from the traditional multiplex experience.

I should note that I enjoy a multiplex, too. But the nearest one is 36 miles distant: in the last two years, Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont lost their two traditional multiplex cinemas, shuttering 15 screens.

Sure, the Marquis has popcorn and M&M’s.

But it also has a fantastic Mexican restaurant and bar. A really fun bar for grownups, with a separate dining room for kids and families (equally fun), where there is likely to be a free movie a few years (or decades) old on the screen. Think “Luca” from 2021 or Disney’s “Robin Hood” from 1973.

My wife and I eat at the bar, chatting with Justin Arseneau, who is both bartender and general manager. He makes a fantastic Margarita (or a “Marquis-a-rita”). We see our neighbors. It’s sort of like an episode of “Cheers,” with inside jokes about the staff or customers scribbled on a chalkboard.

We don’t bring our dinner into the theater, though we could and folks do. But we do bring our booze.

The movie theater has two screens, neither IMAX. The smaller seats 44 patrons, the larger 100. The smaller screen has traditional movie theater seating.

Ah, but the larger? In addition to conventional cinema seats, it has couches and massive easy chairs that swallow you in all the best ways. And when the night is perfect, my wife and I are able to snag two massive chairs screen-right, and for the next two hours we savor:

— The trailers;

— The cinema’s originally produced “silence your cell phone” videos, which often feature the staff, local kids, Vermont comedian and body piercer Pierre Vachon, and a guy in a human-size cell phone costume who will get pummeled. (It alone is worth the price of admission.) Vachon also hosts periodic movie roasts in which the films we love to hate, such as 1995’s cult favorite, “Showgirls,” get the treatment

— The movie itself.

Obviously, the Marquis is not unique: lots of cities have small cinemas with restaurants and bars and comfy couches.

Last year, Partizanfilm opened in Burlington, Vermont, a cinema with two auditoriums, one with 31 seats and one with 19, and — like the Marquis — it also offers beer and wine, in addition to traditional movie snacks. It features independent and foreign films, and if I lived closer, I am sure I would be there often.

Theaters such as the Marquis and Partizanfilm offer the “old-fashioned” movie experience of savoring a film on a big (or “bigger”) screen with a crowd of like-minded cinephiles: laughing together, crying together, nodding in wonder as one.

But in addition to that camaraderie, there is also the sense of neighborliness that comes with scale, and the feeling of community that comes with a plate of nachos.

I have no idea what the future holds for the traditional multiplex. But, trust me, going out to the movies is more fun than ever.

All the best,

Chris

www.chrisbohjalian.com

PS: Some time-sensitive news! Through Thursday night, Barnes & Noble is offering 25% off preorders of upcoming books, such as The Amateur — the most important novel I have written since Midwives (1997) or The Sandcastle Girls (2012). Here is the link to preorder your copy at a 25% discount or simply learn more.