Out of print. Can there be three sadder words for a living author?
In 1975, Farrar Straus & Giroux published Larry Woiwode’s “Beyond the Bedroom Wall.” Here was an extraordinary novel over 600 pages long, a tale of heartbreaking beauty written by a young man about a mid-20th-century American family. Novelist John Gardner, a writer who set high standards for fiction, called it “simply brilliant” and “an enormous intelligent novel,” adding that “nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years.” Esteemed literary critic Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post ranked “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” as one of the great American novels of the 20th century.