Great literature online

[Т А Кузнецова]

Great literature online

www.goodreads.com

This site for those who are interested in reading literature in the original. Here you’ll find information about authors, their books, interviews and much more.

This is an information and part of the interview with John Grisham and his latest novel Gray Mountain.

No one does legal thrillers with an eye for detail and a finger on society's pulse quite like John Grisham. While you may have read some of his more than 30 internationally known books, you are just as likely to be familiar with this former attorney's stories via the big screen, thanks to Hollywood's hunger for film adaptations of such page-turners as The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and The Client.

 

In his latest novel, Gray Mountain, New York lawyer Samantha Kofer takes an unpaid internship in Appalachia after getting downsized from her Wall Street firm. She stumbles on a high-stakes secret in tiny Brady, Virginia, population 2,200, where insular small-town politics mix with Big Coal interests. In this Goodreads exclusive, Grisham offers up a sampling of his reading habits and speaks passionately about the subject matter of his next novel: America's prison system and whom it affects most. We are also rewarded with his advice to a young Matt Damon on the set of The Rainmaker, a glimpse of how Grisham feels when entering courtrooms these days, and his thoughts on idealism and entertainment as they influence his writing.

 

 

John Grisham: The protagonist is a 29-year-old female lawyer from a big firm in New York who suddenly loses her job due to the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. She lost her job with a huge firm in Manhattan, she's suddenly out of work, and she's the heroine of the story.

 

GR: Big Coal plays a role in this book, as coal mining has always been a ubiquitous, but controversial presence in Appalachia. Since you've researched and queried power struggles in a variety of settings for decades now, have your perceptions of power, especially in the hands of a few who control large organizations, corporations, and parts of the government, changed?

 

JG: Well, I'm not sure they've changed. When it comes to corporations, I've always been very skeptical of big business and big corporations, and I think a healthy skepticism is needed: There are so many corporations and so many industries. As far as the government, I think I've changed considerably since when I was a young lawyer. I never had a client—I've had a lot of criminal clients—but I never had one who I thought was really mistreated by the system. We had a pretty good system when I was practicing law; we had good judges and good prosecutors. But I went through the process of writing The Innocent Man, which is a true story, and I got into the world of wrongful convictions, and it has really shaken my faith in the judicial system. There are thousands of innocent people in prison right now, and they were sent there by police, prosecutors, and juries who believe the police and prosecutors. There are so many bad verdicts that happen; it really kind of shakes your faith in the system.