Authors, authors
BY CONNIE OGLE
cogle@herald.com

''Twenty will not come again,'' A.E. Housman wrote in A Shropshire Lad more than a century ago. But for the moment let's forget the gentleman's lamentation on his threescore years and 10 and concentrate on our own imminent and significant number: Twenty years of appearances by the most luminous authors. Twenty years of readings and panels and lectures, of demonstrations of culinary prowess and healing arts. Twenty years of delicate and rare volumes that must be touched with utmost care and kids' books destined to be passed around with jelly-stained hands. Twenty years of falling in love with books -- have you recovered from Augusten Burroughs' hilarious, poignant Dry yet? or Alberto Fuguet's nostalgic Movies of My Life? or Eric Schlosser's exposé Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market? Books, and books, and more books.

Let us think of 20 as our lucky number as the Miami Book Fair International celebrates its anniversary. The fun begins with a special appearance by former First Lady Barbara Bush on Nov. 1 to benefit the fair's literacy efforts and ends Nov. 9 in English with Edwin Black and his unsettling War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race and Abraham Foxman and his unsettling Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, and in Spanish with a panel on Latin American Perspectives with Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Enrique Krauze.

In between, there are more than enough author appearances in both languages to flummox readers, who will face the annual searing dilemma: What to do when two intriguing sessions occur at the same time? How to choose between a reading with Caryl Phillips (A Distant Shore) and Martin Amis (Yellow Dog) and a panel that includes National Book Award nominee Carlos Eire (Waiting for Snow in Havana)? A program featuring debut writers Vendela Vida (And Now You Can Go), Julie Orringer (How to Breathe Underwater) and Felicia Luna Lemus (Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties) or readings by novelists Sena Jeter Naslund (Four Spirits), Pete Dexter (Train) and Robert Morgan (Brave Enemies)? And will there be enough time to fit in an arepa and to shop?

The fair began as a two-day event. Marjory Stoneman Douglas signed books; readers paid 25 cents for cookies with poems tucked inside. ''When we started, we had to beg publishers and authors to come,'' says Eduardo Padron, fair founder and president of Miami Dade College. ``Now they beg us to be here.''

The fair ''is a Miami original,'' says bookseller Mitchell Kaplan, cochairman and co-founder. ``Other people saw what we were doing in Miami, and they went to their own cities and began doing it themselves. The book fair is one of our great exports.''

Look back over the past, and you will find familiar names on this year's schedule. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who kicks off this year's week-night ''Evenings with...'' series on Nov. 2, also was the opener in 1986, the year the fair expanded to a full eight days. Garrison Keillor, who appears Nov. 3, shared his Lake Wobegon humor with an overflow opening-night audience in 1987. Other ''Evenings with...'' speakers are wonderfully recognizable: Mitch Albom (Nov. 4) on The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel (Nov. 5); a couple of Herald guys you might know, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen (Nov. 6); and choreographer Twyla Tharp (Nov. 7).

But the weekend, oh, the weekend! The street fair sprawls on Nov. 8-9; thousands flock, many to ingest arepas. Fiction lovers can revel in readings by Joyce Carol Oates (The Faith of a Writer; The Tattooed Girl) and Edmund White (Fanny: A Fiction); Carolyn Parkhurst (The Dogs of Babel); Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada); Alan Lightman (Reunion); National Book Award nominee Edward Jones (The Known World). Budding political wonks can hear former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Madame Secretary) or former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal (The Clinton Wars). Aficionados can meet Broward's Will Eisner, credited with creating the first graphic novel, A Covenant with God, and here to promote his new work, Fagin the Jew.

For history buffs: Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin; David Maraniss on Vietnam with They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967; Caroline Alexander on The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (hint: Fletcher Christian was the bad guy). For New Yorkers: Colson Whitehead's urban essays, The Colossus of New York. And current-events lovers can get their fix with correspondent Anne Garrels (Naked in Baghdad), with Jessica Stern (Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill) and perhaps with Malika Oufkir, who relates her harrowing ordeal in Morocco in Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in A Desert Prison.

So many books, so little time, and if you don't believe me, check with Sara Nelson, who wrote a book with just such a title. She'll be here, too. But as the man says, 20 may not come again. So it's time to celebrate.

October 23, 2003
To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Once upon a time there was a land in love with fame and brand names. By and by, some famous brand-name people, holed up in their castles, discovered a new trade. They started writing books for children.

Many wrote books about children who sounded like themselves. Jerry, a comedian who made pots of gold with a television show and more pots of gold with commercials for a credit card, wrote a Halloween book about a greedy boy who wants to get his hands on lots and lots of brand-name candy. Madonna, a blond star, wrote about a pretty little blond girl who has no friends because everyone is jealous that she "shines like a star." And Britney, a younger blond singer, wrote a book, with her mother, about a young blond girl who really, really wants to become a singer.

Everyone agreed there was lots of money and publicity to be made in kid lit. It was a time, after all, when a young British woman — who didn't have a famous name when she started — wrote a series of books about a boy named Harry and, legend has it, became richer than Madonna, and richer, even, than the Queen of England. Joanne Kathleen Rowling was interviewed on television and mobbed by adoring fans. The movies made from her books were hailed as a franchise.

Publishers were excited. Over the years they had signed up the likes of Bill Cosby, Jimmy Buffett and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, as children's book authors. Then the floodgates opened. Soon children's bookstores were as studded with stars and has-been stars as "Hollywood Squares," with titles by Spike Lee, Keith Hernandez, Jesse Ventura, Jerry Seinfeld, Britney Spears, Maria Shriver, Katie Couric, Marlee Matlin, Bob Dylan, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, LeAnn Rimes, Jane Seymour, Harvey Fierstein, Della Reese, Michael Bolton and Debbie Allen jostling for shelf space. Madonna and Lynne Cheney, who is married to the vice president, are the latest celebrities to join the crowd. Their books — respectively, "The English Roses" and "A Is for Abigail" — made best-seller lists.

A handful of celebrities, like John Lithgow and Jamie Lee Curtis, actually have a gift for writing for children: they know how to tell a story and how to tell it with words and pictures and whimsical wit. For others, children's books are just another way to merchandise themselves, another vanity production: Britney books, along with Britney dolls, Britney cellphones and Britney mouse pads.

Instead of creating imaginary worlds or engaging fictional characters, many celebrities just riff about themselves. Cindy Crawford has filled her book "About Face" with pictures of herself and her son. And Shaquille O'Neal has given his younger self a starring role in fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." (At least he has a sense of humor: he has cast himself as Little Red and Goldilocks, not as the Big Bad Wolf or Papa Bear.)

Other celebrities seem to think they can use children's books to reinvent their images or jump-start a stalled career. Madonna became a children's author after her movie "Swept Away" failed to sweep anyone away. Spike Lee became a children's author when he said he was finding it increasingly difficult to get money to make his movies. And Ms. Cheney began publishing children's books when, as second lady, she exchanged her image as a combative veteran of the culture wars for the more traditional role of political wife.

The problem was that these authors counted on audiences being able to forget — or ignore — who they used to be. "Please, baby, please," the title of the book Spike Lee wrote with his wife Tonya Lewis Lee, was a famous line, used in a very different context, from his raunchy 1986 comedy, "She's Gotta Have It." And Madonna's previous venture into publishing was "Sex" — a 1992 book that celebrated exhibitionism, bondage, bisexuality and group sex.

The subtext of "Sex" was essentially sadomasochistic: that all relationships are about power and control. Her new book, "Roses," Madonna has said in interviews, strives to impart the Cabala-inspired wisdom that when we disconnect from the "one life-giving force in the world," we "bring chaos and pain and suffering into our lives."

As for Ms. Cheney's new book, "A Is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women," it stands in jarring contrast to her earlier censures of feminism. A page on writers, for instance, features the name of Alice Walker and a drawing of Toni Morrison, even though Ms. Cheney, in her former capacity as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, once pushed for the nomination of Carol Iannone to the endowment's advisory council. Ms Iannone, a literature professor, had written that awarding prestigious prizes to black writers like Ms. Morrison and Ms. Walker sacrificed "the demands of excellence to the democratic dictatorship of mediocrity."

Although Ms. Cheney has often denounced multiculturalism and political correctness, her children's books, "A Is for Abigail" and "America: A Patriotic Primer," are illustrated with pictures of people of many different colors. Madonna's "Roses" similarly features drawings of a rainbow quartet of girls: a blonde, a redhead, an African-American and an Asian.

In retelling several famous folk tales, Shaquille O'Neal's "Shaq and the Beanstalk and Other Very Tall Tales" also tries to take a politically correct approach to violence, awkwardly trying to reconcile the Grimm-ness of the original tales with a gentler perspective. Before knocking out an angry giant with a golden basketball, the hero pauses to deliver a finger-wagging aside: "I have always believed that fighting is the loser's way out. You get nowhere using violence. It's always better to talk your problems out."

Many celebrities serve up similarly well-meaning but trite lessons in their children's books, hoping perhaps to emulate the success of William J. Bennett's best seller, "The Children's Book of Virtues." Katie Couric's "Brand New Kid" delivers the message that kids should reach out to the new boy at school. Keith Hernandez's "First-Base Hero" tells the reader that everyone makes mistakes and that it is important to persevere. And Julie Andrews Edwards's book, "Dumpy and the Firefighters," preaches that everyone can make a valuable contribution to the community.

While such morals are certainly worthy ones, they are no substitute for real storytelling, a craft many celebrities seem to think can be picked up overnight in between their real-life gigs. Other celebrity books do not even promote worthwhile lessons. In Madonna's book a clique of cool girls considers the beautiful Binah a sadly deprived child because she has only one doll and lots of books and has to perform unheard of chores like setting the table and emptying the trash. "The English Roses couldn't believe their eyes," Madonna writes. "They had never seen a girl work so hard in their lives. `She reminds me of Cinderella,' said Amy."

Jerry Seinfeld's "Halloween" has an even more offensive message: greed is good and rudeness is funny. His hero, an obnoxious brat, spurns some of the trick-or-treat candy he has received with snarky disdain: "Do me a favor, you keep that one," he tells an old woman who has given him an orange marshmallow treat. "We've got all the doorstops we need already, thank you very much. We're going for NAME CANDY ONLY this year."

As for the branding of children's literature with celebrity names, the fad shows no signs of flagging. Madonna has four more children's books on the way. The next, "Mr. Peabody's Apples," is due out on Nov. 10. Jay Leno and the football playing twins Tiki and Ronde Barber reportedly have children's books in the works as well.

So far Joanne Kathleen Rowling — never mind the Grimm brothers and Dr. Seuss — faces little serious competition in the children's book business, at least not from the celebrities who covet her celebrity and underestimate the difficulty of her art.




To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play

Sara Paretsky has been giving an eye-opening and thought provoking speech about the Patriot Act, libraries and freedom called "Truth, Lies and Duct Tape" and has made a text version available on her website. Check it out...

http://www.saraparetsky.com/silence.html

The Anthony Awards

Best Novel: City of Bones by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Best First Novel: In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming (St. Martin's)

Best Paperback Original: Fatal Truth by Robin Burcell (Avon)


Macavity Awards

Best Mystery Novel: Winter and Night by S.J. Rozan (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best First Mystery Novel: In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming (St. Martin's Minotaur)


Shamus Awards

Best P.I. Novel: Blackwater Sound by James W. Hall (St. Martin's)

Best First P.I. Novel: The Distance by Eddie Muller (Scribner)

Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel: The Poisoned Rose by D. Daniel Judson (Bantam)


Barry Awards

Best Novel: City of Bones by Michael Connelly

Best First Novel: In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Best British Novel: The White Road by John Connolly

Best Paperback Original: Cold Silence by Danielle Girard


2003 Nero Award: S.J. Rozan

THE STONE READER

On a bright and sunny Sunday, I sweet-talked my family into going to the movies. Several months ago I marked my calendar with the arrival date of "The Stone Reader;" it was worth the wait. I don't see enough movies to properly review one, but I will share a few thoughts. In 1972 Mark Moskowitz bought a book called The Stones of Summer because of a rave review in the NY Times that called it something like the voice of a new generation. He couldn't get into it then, so he put it away and came across it a few years ago. He read it, and fell in love with it.  

Now this is not a book that I would probably read, but any bibliophile/bookbitch can certainly identify with the idea of falling in love with a book, of wanting to read all the author's books. But when Moskowitz went looking for more books by Dow Mossman, he hit a different kind of stone; a stone wall. He couldn't find a thing and not only that, he discovered that this book which he thought brilliant, was out of print. Moskowitz has a film production company that does political commercials and he decided to film his journey to find out what happened to Mossman.  

To be perfectly honest, there were slightly less than a dozen people in the theater during the showing I saw, and at one point I was the only one awake. There are probably too many artsy-fartsy shots of butterflies and moons, although I did love the shots of forsythia, a bush I have missed for my many years of Florida living. Yet the DVD comes out in November, and I find myself longing to order it online from The Stone Reader website because it comes not only with the obligatory additional footage but an entire third disk that won't be available for purchase elsewhere - 4 more hours of a 2 hour movie that put a lot of people to sleep. But it's about books, and one man's passion for books, and his joy and frustration shines through every minute of this film. I've never met Mr. Moskowitz, yet he feels like a friend.  

Barnes & Noble started publishing books, and won the rights to reprint The Stones of Summer at auction. So far it is available only through the B&N website and Amazon.com (pre-order, publication has been pushed back to October.) Borders, Books-a-Million, and the American Booksellers Association group of independent booksellers say they won't be carrying it, and they are not happy that B&N is the publisher, because it is exactly the sort of book indies generally embrace.

"The Stone Reader" is the sort of film that memories are made of.

I See Dead Authors: Authors Who Write from Beyond the Grave
by Marlo Verrilla
Latrobe Bulletin
Latrobe, Pa

I see dead authors. In my job it’s hard not to miss them. No, they are not lurking in the basement with quill in hand creating some masterpiece, but they might as well be. Some dead authors have been publishing for years.

Suspense writer Lawrence Sanders died in 1998 yet just published a new book this year called McNally’s Dare. It seems his character, Archy McNally was so popular, the public couldn’t stand to have him die with his creator, so poor Lawrence has to file 1099 forms from the great beyond. Actually, author Vincent Lardo took over the character with McNally’s Dilemma, which was published in 1999. Lardo has published four books since then under the Sanders name: McNally’s Dare, McNally’s Chance, McNally’s Alibi and McNally’s Folly.

Louis L’Amour, the greatest western writer ever to live, wrote three books a year for more than 30 years during his career, so it seems natural that a little thing like death couldn’t stop his writing obsession. He began his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, while suffering from pneumonia and was editing it the day he died. Since then his publisher, Bantam Books, continues to release his work. The company has re-released many of his books, such as four Hopalong Cassidy novels, but a new original book, With These Hands, a collection of short stories, was published in 2002.

Many other authors died before many of their works were published. Poet Sylvia Plath, died in 1963, with only The Colossus and The Bell Jar in print. Other works were published posthumously, such as: Ariel, Winter Trees, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Other books about her continue to be published. The movie, Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, hit theaters last week in limited release.

The above three authors are like many dead authors releasing books. They have either had their work taken over by someone else or someone found their work and published them after they left this earth. Yet, there is still one other type of dead author that exists, or rather doesn’t exist.

To the shock of kiddies everywhere, Franklin W. Dixon, great author of The Hardy Boys series, is not a real person. In 1927, publisher Edward Statemeyer came up with the idea of a private investigator’s two sons who get mixed up with mysteries of their own to solve. He assigned the story, or stories, as he intended it to be a series, to Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian journalist. McFarlane wrote every book until 1947’s The Phantom Freighter, but by the 1950s, the series had become dated to readers. In 1959, the series was rewritten to reflect a more progressive and faster society, as well as remove some derogatory ethnic references. Some readers liked the change, but others were outraged, thus leading Applewood Books to reprint facsimiles of the original series. These books with the original words and illustrations hit the market in 1991.

The Hardy Boys also had another incarnation in 1986 with the Hardy Boys Casefiles that offered more contemporary action. All in all, the following authors wrote The Hardy Boys series over the years: Leslie McFarlane, Andrew E. Svenson, Harriet S. Adams and James Duncan Lawrence.

So, my fellow book enthusiasts, be careful what you read, you just might be getting messages from the beyond. Dead authors exist and they will keep writing despite the laws of physics.

The following dead authors can be found at the Ligonier Valley Library: Douglas Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V.C. Andrews, Jane Austen, Frank Baum, Max Brand, Catherine Cookson, Brian Daley, Emily Dickinson, Zane Grey, Robert Heinlein, Ernest Hemingway, L. Ron Hubbard, Caroline Keene, Robert Ludlum, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Rich, Harold Robbins, Eliott Roosevelt, Rex Stout, John Kennedy Toole, Anthony Trollope and Gertrude Chandler Warner.

The above list was compiled by Stacy Alesi of the Southwest County Regional Library in Boca Raton, Florida. She is known on the Web as the Bookbitch and can be found at www.bookbitch.com

The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list

Don't like the list? Put your thoughts direct to Robert McCrum

Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.

6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.

9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.

11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.


12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.


13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.


14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.

15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.


16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.

17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.

18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.

19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.

20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.

21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.

22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.

23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.

24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.

25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.

26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.

27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.

28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.

29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.

30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.

31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.

32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.

33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.

35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.

36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.

37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.

38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.

39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.

40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.

41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.

42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.

43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.

45. Ulysses James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.

46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.

47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.

48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.

49. The Trial Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.

50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.

52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.

53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).

54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.

55. USA John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.

56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.

57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.

58. The Plague Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.

60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.

61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.

62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.

63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!

65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.

66. Lord of the Flies William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.

67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68. On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.

69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.

70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.

71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.

73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.

74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'

75. Herzog Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A postmodern masterpiece.

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.

79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.

80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.

81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.

82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.

83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.

84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.

85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.

86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.

87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.

88. The BFG Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.

89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.

90. Money Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.

92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.

94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.

95. La Confidential James Ellroy
Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.

96. Wise Children Angela Carter
A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.

97. Atonement Ian McEwan
Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.

98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman
Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.

100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.

Who did we miss?
So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?
Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?
Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?
What's happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Hesse's Siddhartha, Mishima's The Sea of Fertility, Süskind's Perfume and Zola's Germinal?
Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?
Let us know what you think. Send your own suggestions for the 100 best books ever to: observer@guardianunlimited.co.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

Fiction

T.C. Boyle, "Drop City" (Viking/Penguin Group USA)
Shirley Hazzard, "The Great Fire" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Edward P. Jones, "The Known World" (Amistad/HarperCollins)
Scott Spencer, "A Ship Made of Paper" (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Marianne Wiggins, "Evidence of Things Unseen" (Simon & Schuster)

Nonfiction

Anne Applebaum, "Gulag: A History" (Doubleday/Random House)
George Howe Colt, "The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American
Summer
Home" (Scribner/S&S)
John D’Emilio, "Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin"
(Free Press/S&S)
Carlos Eire, "Waiting For Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy"
(Free Press/S&S)
Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness
at the Fair That Changed America" (Crown Publishers/Random House)

Young People’s Literature

Paul Fleischman, "Breakout" (Cricket Books/A Marcato Books/ Carus
Publishing)
Polly Horvath, "The Canning Season" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Murphy, "An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the
Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793" (Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin)
Richard Peck, "The River Between Us" (Dial Books/Penguin Group USA)
Jacqueline Woodson, "Locomotion" (G.P. Putnam’s Sons./Penguin Group
USA)

Poetry

Carole Muske-Dukes, "Sparrow: Poems" (Random House)
Charles Simic, "The Voice at 3 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems"
(Harcourt)
Louis Simpson, "The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems,
1940-2001" (BOA Editions)
C.K. Williams, "The Singing: Poems" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Kevin Young, "Jelly Roll: A Blues" (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)

from Poynteronline
Posted, Oct. 13, 2003
Updated, Oct. 13, 2003

The First Draft of Mystery

By Robin Sloan
Online Reporter

There are a lot of would-be novelists in newsrooms across America.

Maybe you're one of them. If so, today's your lucky day, because I've got a sure-fire plan to go from writing police briefs to paperback best-sellers.

Here's what you do:

First, attend the University of Florida. Read all of Raymond Chandler's stories. Major in journalism, minor in creative writing.

Graduate. Get yourself to a newspaper in Florida.

Start on the cops beat, then move to feature writing.

Get a gig writing for the Fort Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel magazine during the height of the '80s crime wave in Florida, during that magic, morbid moment when Fort Lauderdale is the murder capital of the world. Write some awesome stories, and get short-listed for the Pulitzer.

As you're doing all this, write on your own time, too. Pen a couple of novels after hours -- but leave them in your desk drawer. They're just for practice.

Parlay your magazine experience into a gig at the Los Angeles Times. Now you're in Chandler's territory.

Wait three years. Publish your first mystery novel. Win a prize. Quit journalism.

More than a dozen years -- and books -- later, you'll find yourself at the Don CeSar, a huge, pinker-than-life hotel on Florida's St. Pete Beach.

You'll be talking to a room full of features-page editors from across the country. And here's what you'll say:

"It's safe to say I would not be standing here talking to you about my novels if I had not been a journalist first."

OK, maybe it won't go exactly like that. But that's what happened to Michael Connelly, who's gone from covering cops in Daytona Beach to selling millions of books around the world. And even if your path is, er, not precisely the same as his, there are some lessons to be gained from Connelly's experience.

The Telling Detail
Michael Connelly was working at the Sun-Sentinel magazine, and Fort Lauderdale was the most dangerous place in the country.

Let's see how the homicide squad operates, he thought. So he spent a week with them, going out whenever they were called, day or night.

The central character in his story was the squad's sergeant. At each murder scene, he would take off his glasses and crouch quietly beside the body. Connelly made a note of these solemn moments.

Later, at the very end of the week, he was talking to the sergeant for the last time. The man looked utterly exhausted. He took off his glasses.

And that's when Connelly saw the groove. When the sergeant took off his glasses and held them in his mouth as he crouched over the murder victims, his teeth were clenched so tight they cut into the plastic. There was a deep groove.

That was a window into the sergeant -- it was the telling detail.

Connelly has looked for those details ever since.

Here's the story.

From journalism, Connelly learned the craft of writing well and quickly; the discipline to do it every day; and the focus that comes with searching for the single, telling detail.

He also learned journalism's public mission.

Connelly calls his genre "mystery with a message." In mystery, he says, there are writers who are trying to talk about what's happening in our lives today — racism, terrorism, corporate greed. And because mystery writers, like journalists, write fast, their work has a special immediacy.

Six months after Sept. 11, 2001, Connelly had a book out, "City of Bones," that talked about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and how they made everything else seem small in comparison.

Last April, his book "Lost Light" hit the stands. The Publishers Weekly blurb says that the book leads Connelly's recurring hero, Harry Bosch, into contact with "the elite terrorist hunters of the new Department of Homeland Security. "This is a thriller that raises questions about the Patriot Act, Connelly says. Mystery with a message.

So Connelly still uses the tools of journalism, and he deals with many of the same subjects. But there are, of course, some significant differences as well.

Now Connelly revels in the journalist's curse: He never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

"I don't let accuracy get in the way of the velocity and drama of a story," he says. "In a way, I pride myself on being a manipulator of facts."

In 1996, Connelly wrote "The Poet," a mystery with a journalist as protagonist.

"I'd never read a fictional account of a journalist that was accurate to my experience," Connelly says. So he said to himself, "I'm gonna write the first accurate thriller about a journalist ... I accomplished that for about 50 pages."

Here's how it sounds:
Glenn was a good editor who prized a good read more than anything else about a story. That's what I liked about him. In this business editors are of two schools. Some like facts and cram them into a story until it is so overburdened that practically no one will read it to the end. And some like words and never let the facts get in the way. Glenn liked me because I could write and he pretty much let me choose what I wrote about ... If he were gone, I'd probably find myself back on the daily cop beat, writing briefs off the police log. Doing little murders.
But after that, Connelly says, the character becomes a journalist's fantasy. For example:
The rest of the windows shattered and as I completed my roll I opened my eyes enough to get a bead on Gladden. He was squirming on the floor, his eyes wide but not focused and his hands held to his ears. But I could tell he had been too late in recognizing what was happening. I had been able to block at least some of the impact of the concussion grenade. He looked as if he had taken the full brunt of it. I saw the gun lying loose on the floor next to his legs. Without pausing to consider my chances, I quickly crawled to it.
Oh, well. "Being deadly accurate -- in novels -- is deadly boring," Connelly says.

A journalist turned novelist, using the skills learned writing the first draft of history to infuse current concerns and meaning into popular mystery. Could there be anything he misses?

Absolutely. He left journalism a decade ago. He works at home now, all alone, weaving intricate plots, making mysteries with meaning, and more than anything else, Michael Connelly misses the newsroom.

» Read more about Connelly at his official website


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http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=51191

TOO-SEXY LIBRARIAN

By ALISHA BERGER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEXTBOOK CASE: Harvard library assistant Desiree Goodwin says she's been passed over 13 times for promotion because she's black - and sexy.
- Mark Garfinkel

October 13, 2003 -- Beautiful Harvard reference assistant Desiree Goodwin is one smart librarian - but her sexy short skirts, tight blouses and dark skin are holding her back professionally, her lawsuit against the stodgy university claims.
The 39-year-old Cornell graduate has two master's degrees and 16 years of experience in her field, but those qualifications haven't helped ignite her career.

Goodwin says she's missed out on more than a dozen promotions in the past nine years because of gender and racial discrimination.

"I've been at Harvard for nine years and not once have I encountered a black professional librarian at any meeting or any gathering anywhere," Goodwin said. "I've heard about them, but I haven't seen one."

In her complaint, Goodwin says she was passed over for 13 promotions that went to white men and women with less experience and fewer qualifications. She also said her female boss identified her "sexy" wardrobe, "low- cut" tops and an alleged bad reputation as reasons for her professional stagnation.

"A man would never be penalized for being too attractive," Goodwin said. "It could only enhance a man's career if he is sexy. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. Exaggerated femininity will work against you, but hyper-masculinity will work in your favor."

Goodwin, who still works at the Harvard Design School's Frances Loeb Library, said her boss's claims were bogus.

"White women wore sexy clothes, were outgoing, attractive and they were getting mentored and getting promoted, while I was being ignored and asked to work extra hours," Goodwin said. "I think it is racist because they feel threatened by the success of someone they don't feel is like them."

Goodwin added that most of the people in a position to hire and promote new staff members are white and called their lack of support for her advancement "cultural nepotism."

"They repeatedly select young white men and women to mentor as their protegees," she said.

Goodwin said she was told she'd never get a promotion at the Ivy League institution. She also claims a supervisor told her she'd "have no problem getting a job elsewhere because the first thing employers look for is a qualified black person."

Harvard University said the suit doesn't have legs.

"The case is without merit," Harvard spokesman, Joe Wrinn, said in a statement. "Gender and race were not factors."

Wrinn said the proof is in the pudding: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination both dismissed Goodwin's case.

The university has filed a motion in Boston federal court to dismiss the complaint. Goodwin has until Oct. 31 to respond.

New York Post Online Edition: news

Autumn 2003 Mystery Book Sense 76 Top Ten

It's not a mystery why these titles were chosen by independent booksellers as their top ten picks for the fall.

1. TO THE BONE, by Neil McMahon (HarperCollins, $23.95, 0060529164) "Dr. Carroll Monks, emergency room physician and part-time sleuth, is back and in fine form. Mystery lovers who haven't yet discovered author Neil McMahon and his Monks books are in for a real treat!" --Susan Wasson, Bookworks, Albuquerque, NM


2. THE DEATH YOU DESERVE, by David Bowker (Minotaur, $12.95, 0312311788) "The Death You Deserve is great. It's a title that I'll definitely recommend to thriller fans looking for a fresh voice." --Meredith Whiles, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington, KY


3. LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER, by Margaret Maron (Mysterious Press, $23.95, 0892967803) "This multilayered novel is rich in surprises and fun, as well as murders, relatives, and puzzles. The heroine finds her backbone as she struggles to understand and deal with the past and present. It is delicious to see her blossom in the midst of mayhem." --June Applen, The Book Mark, Atlantic Beach, FL


4. STILL LIFE WITH CROWS, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Warner, $25.95, 0446531421) "Medicine Creek, Kansas, is slowly dying as its farming base erodes along with the land. Main Street is shuttered, and the nearest mall is 200 miles away. The few townsfolk, unused to change, are terrified when a body is found mutilated in a cornfield. What does the weird tableau symbolize? As more are unveiled, enigmatic FBI agent Pendergast arrives from New Orleans to take charge in another knockout from Preston and Child." --Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ Also a Time Warner Audio (1586215043, Abridged Cassette)


5. THE SERPENT'S KISS: A Novel, by Mark T. Sullivan (Atria, $25, 0743439821) "A snake-bearing serial killer is on the loose in San Diego, and the more detective Seamus Moynihan and his crew find out about the case the more possible suspects they discover. Is it the internationally renowned reptile handler from the zoo? The drug dealer with a passion for 'hot herps'? Or someone with a connection to Lilith, mother of demons?" --Maryelizabeth Hart, Mysterious Galaxy Books, San Diego, CA


6. THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf, $24, 037541472X) "Small Boat is a follow-up to Fesperman's 1999 Lie in the Dark, which featured Bosnian cop Vlado Petric. Set five years after Vlado's daring escape from Bosnia, Fesperman picks up the story in Berlin, where Vlado is enlisted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal to find two WWII criminals from Bosnia. This is the best thriller/detective novel that I've read this year, a literary triumph from start to finish." --Barry Martin, Book'em Mysteries, South Pasadena, CA


7. EVERYONE DIES: A Kevin Kerney Novel, by Michael McGarrity (Dutton, $23.95, 0525947612) "Everyone Dies is by far the best police mystery I've read this year. Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney and his wife, Army MP Lieutenant Colonel Sara Brannon, have taken leave for the birth of their son -- a leave that turns into a nightmare as people from Kevin's professional past begin turning up dead. Will Kevin's wife and baby be the next victims?" --Bob Spear, The Book Barn, Leavenworth, KS Also a Brilliance Audio (1590867815, Abridged Cassette)


8. MORGUE MAMA: The Cross Kisses Back, by C.R. Corwin (Poisoned Pen, $24.95, 1590580745) "Morgue Mama is a real treat. The interaction between the older newspaper morgue librarian and the young, upstart crime reporter, Aubrey McGinty, was terrific. If you enjoy a chuckle or two with your mystery, you'll love this one!" --Linda Dewberry, Whodunit? Books, Olympia, WA


9. JUDGMENT CALLS, by Alafair Burke (Holt, $23, 0805073868) "Take an insider's look at Portland's Drug and Vice Division as Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid deals with courtrooms, criminal investigations, and her personal life. This may be Alafair Burke's first book, but she knows her way around the justice system, and her father, James Lee Burke, has every right to be proud!" --Barbara Theroux, Fact & Fiction, Missoula, MT


10. HARD AS NAILS: A Joe Kurtz Novel, by Dan Simmons (Minotaur, $24.95, 0312305281) "A relative newcomer to the hard-boiled crime genre, Simmons explodes onto the scene with his tough-guy antihero, Joe Kurtz. In this third novel in the series, ex-private eye, ex-con Kurtz hunts a serial killer who's targeting heroin addicts, while he's evading various hit men who are out for the bounty on his head. A serious, guilty pleasure awaits!" --David Thompson, Murder by the Book, Houston, TX

Publishers fight for more 'male lit'

Two men are fighting back against the "chick lit" phenomenon by setting up a publishing company exclusively for men's and boys' books.

David Elliot and Brad Thompson want to attack the "namby-pamby, touchy-feely" style of authors like Tony Parsons.

The pair told the Daily Telegraph there should be more buccaneering tales that teach boys about chivalry and stoicism.

Spitfire Books' first release will be Barry Norman's laddish 30-year-old novel Have a Nice Day.

The company, which will publish boys' books under the title Young Spitfire, is fighting the corner for men, believing female authors such as Zadie Smith and Helen Fielding receive too much attention.

"Because of feminism and political correctness, what young men read now is crap these days, with books by people like Tony Parsons," said Mr Elliot in the Telegraph.
"It's all this new dad stuff, all namby pamby touchy-feely. Where are all the great buccaneering, derring-do, true-life adventures and cowboy stories? Our criteria is that we want bloody good reads."

Spitfire wants a return to adventure stories where men are men and debauchery is welcomed along with smoking and drinking.

Female characters look like they will be given short shrift in Spitfire stories, as Mr Elliot believes JK Rowling was wrong to have made Harry Potter's friend Hermione his equal.

"It is typical of modern children's books in which there is a boy and a girl and the girl is as good as the boy," he said.

"Just William is a much better read for boys. Violet Elizabeth Bott was a whingeing, snivelling sneak who was always frightened. That is how I would like the girls to be."


The publishers say the influence of female-orientated books has edged out writers such as Neville Chute and JB Priestley.
Mr Elliot said Spitfire will provide an alternative to the publisher Virago, founded 30 years ago to promote women's fiction.

"They had their day," he said.

"Now it's time for us to have ours to redress the balance because men are not getting a fair crack of the whip."

Are there really not enough novels around for men and boys? Send us your thoughts using the form below.


I've read quite a few novels where men get to be extremely debauched, smoke and drink to excess and have lots of adventures where girls are given very short shrift. Of course, their focus is gay men in the urban jungle so maybe it's not quite what Spitfire want...
David, UK


I challenge you to find a boy equivalent of Hermione, ie someone who is good at studies not games. All the children fiction I have read has boy heroes as good at things other than academic subjects (eg William, Jennings, Harry Potter etc) while there is a wide range of "academic is cool" fiction for girls. When schools are failing our boys it is sad that fiction is too.
John, UK

The lack of books aimed at boys is simply the result of market forces. Because parents have an increased tendency to talk to baby girls, they pick up linguistic skills earlier on and are consequently much more likely to read. More female readers means more femenist books being written to supply the demand.
Graeme Phillips, Germany, normally UK

I think this is great and don't know why anyone hadn't thought of it earlier. I hope it succeeds - most (thirtysomething) blokes I know haven't read a single book since school. It would be nice to see books aimed at men that aren't either (a) humorous; (b) thrillers; (c) fantasy/sci-fi or (d) about the underworld/drug culture - because it my experience that's about all they'll read (if they do at all). Let's see something different.
Holly, UK

I look forward to seeing Spitfire Books crash and burn. Elliot and Thompson are the literary equivalent of The Darkness: sounding ironic without meaning to and ending up all the more pitiable because apparently this really is the best they can do. To quote "namby-pamby" Oscar Wilde: books are either well-written or badly written, that is all. What matters in creative writing is not what is said but the way it is said.

Men are not getting a fair crack of the whip? Well, to quote Martin Amis (a man who really knows how to write) in his new novel: that seems like a mild reparation for five million years in power.
Alan Simpson, Belfast, NI


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3180722.stm

Published: 2003/10/10 13:45:05 GMT

© BBC MMIII

I'm slightly obsessed with Mark Haddon these days...

Mark Haddon: Seeing the World Through New Eyes

Sunday, September 28, 2003

With a handful of picture books to his name, reams of unpublished novels in his drawer, and an agent who told him he would never ford the abyss between children's and adult fiction, Mark Haddon sat down one evening and wrote the following lines: "It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead."

When he wrote it, he did not know the voice belonged to Christopher, a 15-year-old math prodigy with a rare developmental disorder. He didn't realize that he was writing a spare new form of noir, told in the slab-flat voice of a child who has trouble processing anything so ambiguous as tragedy or emotion. Discovering the story even as he extruded one flat little sentence after another, Haddon wondered whether there would be readers willing to suspend themselves in such a disquieting world view. The answer was a resounding yes. His Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has gathered fans the world over, climbed its way up bestseller lists, and cloned itself into 30 languages, including Lithuanian and Chinese.

Perhaps it's a book for our time. Perhaps it's because we live in a world that craves stories that pit the young against rude fate: Consider, for instance, today's bestselling fiction: The Lovely Bones, The Life of Pi, The Secret Life of Bees -- novels about children beset by rape, murder, shipwreck, predators. In Haddon's remarkable story, the reader is made to travel the perilous road of adult perfidy with a cicerone who doesn't know what perfidy means -- a bit like riding a racehorse with blinders. And yet there is grace in the journey.

Forty-year-old Haddon was the first in his family to go to college -- in his case, as he mentions above, Oxford. His father "clawed his way" through night school only to become an architect during the building slump of the '70s; he made do by designing slaughterhouses. His mother was not a partisan of books. The town he grew up in -- Northampton -- despite being a mere hour from London, didn't have a bookshop. He grew up anxious, even depressed, although he would posit that "adults who remember their childhood as idyllic are deceiving themselves." The kids, he says, who are comfortable in the classroom are uncomfortable on the playground, and vice versa. There is bullying. Sadism. Getting from day to day is a genuine puzzle: A child who is sensitive to it might be a writer someday.

His favorite book at age 10 was The Origins of the Universe, by Albert A. Hinkelbein, which to this day sits next to his desk. When he read Lord of the Rings, at age 12, he thought he had graduated to adult fare, but Camus's The Stranger disabused him of that notion: He failed to understand what was so good about it. He believes it was then that his fascination with books began.

At first, he thought he would become a scientist. Maybe it was his parents' supportiveness, he says, maybe it was a bloodymindedness he inherited from his father, but what he remembers vividly was "the unspoken assumption that if I put my mind to something I would be able to do it." He feels he would never have succeeded as a writer without the underlying confidence that it would all come right some day. He survived a boys' boarding school -- "a low-security prison with slightly better décor, where there was violence and cruelty" -- because he could make people laugh. At Oxford, he majored in English. And then, of course, comes the stretch he describes above, caring for the disabled, after which he published a number of books for children, among them Ocean Express, The Sea of Tranquility and Gilbert's Gobstopper.

He has compared his success to someone who has pressed his face to the window of literary life for so long he cannot fathom how he tumbled in and landed in the Jacuzzi. He is ill prepared for fans, for the movie deal, for Brad Pitt wanting to own the story, for Steve Kloves ("Fabulous Baker Boys," "Wonder Boys") wanting to write the script. Husband to an Oxford professor of literature, father of a 2-year-old boy, expecting a baby soon, he still looks forward to getting together with aspiring children's books writers -- going off to Devon or Yorkshire or Shropshire, cooking his own meals and chatting all night into the wee.

What's next for this whirlwind phenomenon? Blood and Scissors. Of it he will only say this: "A few weeks ago, in an interview, I made passing reference to the funny bits in Curious Incident. The journalist who was interviewing me was outraged. She had wept her way through the book. So perhaps the best way to describe my next novel is to say that it is the story of an architect (not, I hasten to add, my father) having a rather dramatic breakdown."

With funny bits.

-- Marie Arana

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

The Writing Life

By Mark Haddon
Sunday, September 28, 2003

In 1980, I went to Oxford University to study English literature. After three years of big books, earnest late-night discussions, drunken parties and periodic essay crises, I decided, like many of my friends, that I needed to restore some kind of balance by spending time doing something that revolved around the needs of other people for a change.

I signed up with a volunteer's organization and was duly shipped to a small town in Wales to work with Michael, a young man paralyzed by multiple sclerosis. I was to be one of two helpers who did alternating 24-hour shifts, cooking, feeding, washing, taking Michael to the shops, turning him in bed at night, changing his catheter bag, holding his cigarettes so that he could smoke.

What I wasn't told until I was being driven to the house by Michael's social worker was that he had recently become an evangelical Christian of a particularly fervent stripe. He was now a member of a rapidly shrinking church whose members spent perhaps a little too much time deciding who was and wasn't going to be "saved."

In the circumstances, Michael and I got on rather well, though he was adamant that when I died I was going to hell (along with Catholics, lesbians, Muslims and pretty much everyone apart from seven or so members of his own church).

Michael had thrown the last three volunteers out of his house -- one because he had beer stashed under his bed, another because he was gay, the last because he owned a pack of tarot cards. They had been replaced by Neil, a reformed alcoholic who had been told, personally, by God, to go and work with Michael. This, it turned out, was not one of God's better ideas. Neil was the kind of man who couldn't open a packet of biscuits without spraining an ankle and setting fire to something. Despite having almost no education, he was attempting to read the New Testament in Greek using only a battered, second-hand Greek dictionary. He burnt meals, shrank washing and was persuaded to buy a second-hand car even though he couldn't drive. A door fell off the car the following week.

Shortly after my arrival, the local vicar dropped round for tea. The local vicar was very definitely not one of the saved, but he was dogged and cheerful and determined to make the best of a difficult conversation. Matters were not helped when Neil and I heard a loud pop and realized that Michael's catheter bag had burst. We spent the next five minutes trying to mop several pints of urine from the carpet while Michael and the vicar drank tea, ate egg mayonnaise sandwiches and made prickly small talk above our heads.

A few days later I attended a prayer meeting in Michael's living room. At the climax of the evening, when the singing and the preaching and the giving witness had whipped everyone into a state of high excitement, a large truck drove past the house shaking the walls. Immediately Neil leapt out of his seat, shouting, "It's the Second Coming!"

I learnt four valuable lessons during my time in Wales.

One: The great majority of the problems that occupy people with disabilities are the problems that occupy all of us -- money, family, relationships, broken washing machines, neighbors with electric guitars, etc.

Two: Sunny stoical people can become seriously disabled, but becoming seriously disabled does not necessarily make you a sunny stoical person. Consequently people with serious disabilities can be as cantankerous, small-minded and difficult as the rest of us.

Three: You can live with someone who is paralyzed from the neck down and spend more time looking after the third member of the household who is physically fit and in full possession of all his faculties.

Four: The blackest moments in life are often the funniest.

These things were on my mind when I sat down to write The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Though it is deliberately never mentioned in the book, Christopher, the narrator, has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. I knew, from the beginning, however, that Christopher had to be a rounded, believable human being, not an accurate clinical portrait of someone with the condition. Such a portrait, in any case, would be impossible, because people with Asperger's are as varied and eccentric and diverse a group as Italians or bus drivers or piano players. So I did no research.

After leaving Wales, I did a series of jobs that involved working with people who had physical handicaps and learning difficulties. And ever since that time I have been interested in the subject. If I come across a newspaper article about Tourette's, I'll read it. If I come across a television program about Down Syndrome, I'll watch it. But I made a point of not getting large tomes on autism out of the library. I made no visits to special schools. Indeed, when I started putting Christopher's character together, I borrowed all of his ticks, habits and obsessions from a variety of people I know, none of whom would be labeled as having a disability.

Consequently I was amazed (and very flattered) when, shortly after the book was published, I started receiving letters from parents and grandparents of young people with Asperger's, saying that I had "got it exactly right." I was equally amazed (and very disconcerted) to receive a string of invitations to speak at academic conferences on autism.

It comes down, I think, to this: We live in an age obsessed with facts. If we want to learn about a group of people with whom we have very little contact, we watch a TV documentary, we read a book of popular science, we buy a biography. We forget, too easily, that we can have all the facts and still be no nearer the truth. We forget that imagination is still one of the most powerful tools we possess.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout's father says that to understand another human being you have to spend half an hour in her shoes. This, of course, is not just Atticus Finch talking to his daughter about Tom Robinson, Boo Radley and the other residents of Maycomb. This is also Harper Lee talking to us about the book we are holding in our hands.

I am always suspicious of writers who have what Keats called "a palpable design" on their readers, however honorable that design. But you cannot write a half-decent novel if you do not empathize with your characters, and if you do not try to persuade your readers to feel the same way.

It is for this reason that novels remain one of the best ways we have of understanding people we have never met, one of the shortest routes to a half-hour in another person's shoes.

So, if Curious Incident has any palpable design on readers, it is to persuade them that however different we may be from one another, however alien we may seem in one another's eyes, the things that separate us are dwarfed by the things we have in common. •


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

AUTHOR ANNOUNCES MORTAL WORK OF ART

Writer Shelley Jackson invites participants in a new work entitled "Skin." Each participant must agree to have one word of the story tattooed upon his or her body. The text will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium. The full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another. In the event that insufficiant participants come forward to complete the first and only edition of the story, the incomplete version will be considered definitive. If no participants come forward, this call itself is the work.

Prospective participants should contact the author (shelley@drizzle.com) and explain their interest in the work. If they are accepted they must sign a contract and a waiver releasing the author from any responsibility for health problems, body image disorders, job-loss, or relationship difficulties that may result from the tattooing process. On receipt of the waiver, the author will reply with a registered letter specifying the word (or word plus punctuation mark) assigned to participant. Participants must accept the word they are given, but they may choose the site of their tattoo, with the exception of words naming specific body parts, which may be anywhere but the body part named. Tattoos must be in black ink and a classic book font. Words in fanciful fonts will be expunged from the work.

When the work has been completed, participants must send a signed and dated close-up of the tattoo to the author, for verification only, and a portrait in which the tattoo is not visible, for possible publication. Participants will receive in return a signed and dated certificate confirming their participation in the work and verifying the authenticity of their word. Author retains copyright, though she contracts not to devalue the original work with subsequent editions, transcripts, or synopses. However, correspondence and other documentation pertaining to the work (with the exception of photographs of the words themselves) will be considered for publication.

From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.


SHELLEY JACKSON'S INERADICABLE STAIN