What does it take to become a best-selling novelist?
In “Boxers, Briefs and Books,” an essay he wrote as op-ed contributor of
The New York Times for its September 5, 2010 issue, John Grisham, author of the best-selling legal thrillers
The Pelican Brief and
The Firm and the forthcoming
The Confession, looks back to his personal odyssey from a succession of dead-end jobs as garden nursery assistant, plumbing assistant, highway asphalt crewman, and department store men’s underwear salesman to small-town tax lawyer and trial lawyer and state legislator until he finally stumbled on a most unlikely career—writing. He calls writing “still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.”
“I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort,” Grisham recalls. “It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics.”
Read John Grisham’s “Boxers, Briefs and Books” in The New York Times now! In “Mystery and Evidence,” Tim Crane, philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the books
The Mechanical Mind (1995) and
Elements of Mind (2001), thinks that it isn’t right for atheists to ask religious believers for evidence for their claims that God created the world and then reject these claims in the absence of such evidence.
Writing in the “The Stone,” the forum of
The New York Times for contemporary philosophers on timely and timeless issues, Crane explains that while science is a very specific and technical kind of knowledge that requires patience, pedantry, a narrowing of focus, and considerable mathematical knowledge and ability, religious belief does not construct hypothesis for its claims but accepts mysteries as a consequence of what makes the world meaningful.
“Religious belief tolerates a high degree of mystery and ignorance in its understanding of the world,” Crane says. “When the devout pray, and their prayers are not answered, they do not take this as evidence which has to be weighed alongside all the other evidence that prayer is effective.”
Read Tim Crane’s “Mystery and Evidence” in The New York Times now! 
