My novel Necessary Errors will be published by Penguin as a paperback original and an e-book in August 2013. It’s available for advance order now at Indiebound, Apple Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-a-Million, and Powells. You can also add it to your bookshelf at Goodreads and Library Thing.
Barnes & Noble has chosen it as a fall 2013 Discover Great New Writers selection.
(A note for reviewers, booksellers, or anyone else with an advance reading copy: The version you’re reading has typos, as advance copies naturally and forgivably do. But one of the typos inadvertently reverses the meaning of a sentence. On page 434, at the end of line 12, please insert the word “won’t” so that the sentence reads “one won’t have that sensation.” Thanks! This message will self-destruct a month and a half before publication.)
You can read a little more about me on the “About” page of this blog. Closer to the time of publication, I’ll be posting news about the book here on my blog. In the meantime, here are some kind words from early readers:
“Crain (American Sympathy) continues his ascendant career with this fully realized debut novel, which delights and surprises with every paragraph. The setting is 1990 Prague, a year after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. . . . The plot is compelling, but Crain’s talent for nuance and dialog, particularly in the gay bar scenes, is an observational wonder. . . . This novel is a pleasure to navigate with its large, likable cast.”
—Travis Fristoe, Library Journal
“Crain reinvents the novel of the innocent in his well-wrought debut.”
“Caleb Crain has written a novel of surpassing intelligence and unexpected beauty about a young American’s year in post-Communist Prague—and about how we find, and construct, the story of our lives. His great achievement is to make the unfolding of Jacob Putnam’s newfound sexual freedom resonate with the unfolding of Czechs’ new historical freedoms, so these separate arcs seem of a piece. His precision of description, whether of architecture or emotional weather, is enviable; his dialogue both playful and profound. It is rare to read a book of this length and feel that every sentence mattered, rarer still to finish a novel of such intellectual depth and be so moved.”
—Amy Waldman, author of The Submission
“This novel sounds like nothing else happening now in American fiction. It’s a tale of erotic awakening that contains—more like encodes—an attempt to read an historical moment, the nineties, when it seemed to many people that history was over. It has shades of Young Werther blowing through it. And shades of Young Törless. But also something other that’s quiet and powerful and its own.”
—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
“Caleb Crain describes a young man’s and a country’s first tastes of freedom with a lucid and matter-of-fact intelligence. Necessary Errors offers an invaluable record of Prague at the beginning of the 1990s in a style that places it among the great novels of Americans abroad. It’s The Ambassadors for the generation that came of age with the downfall of the Soviet Union.”
—Marco Roth, author of The Scientists
“Caleb Crain’s beautiful novel is a real feat of memory and invention, which captures the feeling of being young, sensitive, and vaguely but intensely ambitious better than anything I know in recent fiction. Everything in Necessary Errors feels both transitory and indelible, and isn’t that the way?”
—Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision
“I’ve long admired Caleb Crain’s writing, and Necessary Errors is a tender, immersive, insightful novel. Its author builds with affection a world large and small—of early-nineties Prague, gay nightlife, the hardships of laundry, the penumbra of post-Soviet capitalism, beer versus tea, intense expat friendships, a hamster who lives in a pot, and the hopeful stages of love.”
—Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding
“It is rare, and most welcome, to read a first novel with as much elegance, intelligence, humor, and tenderness as Necessary Errors. It is also rare to read any novel that creates this much beauty with such a light but sure touch. An exquisite debut.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, author of The Sky Below and A Seahorse Year
“As someone who is often unduly nostalgic about having been in her twenties during the 1990s (though not for as good a reason as having been in Prague during the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution), this novel triggered something like a sense memory. Caleb Crain is remarkable at capturing that time in life when ambition and longing are at once all-consuming and all over the map. I winced in self-recognition more than once—and marveled at the author’s insights more often than that.”
—Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth
and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House
“I don’t know that I’ve ever read a novel that gets down, the way this one does, how it felt to be an American and a gay man at the end of the Cold War—so exiled from the country you grew up in that you go abroad to make a new world. Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors is an adventure of the head and heart. His hero, Jacob, turns to the cafes, bedrooms, and libraries of newly free Eastern Europe, an American in search of a European Bildungsroman, in search of love and possibility both.”
—Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh
“Youth and innocence—remember them? Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors stabs the heart with the story of Jacob Putnam’s sentimental education in Prague, and reminds us that to be young is to live abroad in a fallen empire where the talk goes on all night, the dumplings are sliced thick, and blue jeans are rare and too expensive. Pick this novel up and you won’t forget it.”
—Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True
