Book Buzz: John Grisham to write sequel to 'A Time To Kill'

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

John Grisham talks about 'A Time to Kill' at the world premiere of the stage adaptation of his work at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jose Luis Magana AP)

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the book world today:

Grisham returns: Legal thriller titan John Grisham has written a sequel to his best seller A Time To Kill, called Sycamore Row, due out from Doubleday on Oct. 22. In the book, Jake Brigance returns to the courtroom in a "dramatic showdown as Ford County again confronts its tortured history." A Time To Kill was on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list for 83 weeks and reached No. 2 in 1993.

Tsarnaev brothers book: Riverhead has announced that Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen will write "a major book" about the Boston bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It's the first big book to be announced on the bombings.

Mariano Rivera memoir: Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera will write a memoir called The Closer, planned for release next spring from Little, Brown. The book will cover Rivera's impoverished childhood in Panama through signing with the Yankees, and how he has maintained "deeply Christian values in professional athletics."

Beyond the 'Twilight Zone': In her memoir, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, Anne Serling characterizes her famous father, known for writing 92 of 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone, as more than just the omniscient voice at the end of the iconic show.

RIP Frederick L. McKissack: Frederick L. McKissack, the award-winning author of more than 100 books for young readers with an African-American focus, died Sunday at 73. With his wife, Patricia, he co-wrote books about Frederick Douglass, Marian Anderson, Pullman Porter and more African-American Heroes.

Rare books returned: More than 1,400 rare books that were stolen from Lambeth Palace in London in the 1970s have been returned, almost 40 years later. How it happened is straight out of the plot of a novel: In 2011, the library received a sealed letter from a former employee on his deathbed, revealing the location of the rare classics, including an early edition of Henry IV, Part II.

Famed authors collaborate: Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan will kick off a round of Exquisite Corpse hosted by Goodreads, a game where each participant continues a story based on the previous person's lines. Other participating authors include Anne Lamott, Lauren Oliver, Sarah Dessen and Margaret Atwood.

Classic doodles: Check out handwritten manuscript pages from 25 authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain.

Want more Book Buzz? Follow @usatodaybooks and @lindsdee on Twitter.

View the original article here

Sue Grafton spreads the 'W' word

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

'W is for Wasted' is the title of Sue Grafton's new book. (Photo: None)

Author of beloved alphabet series announces title of 23rd novelGrafton says books come first and the titles followFate of series' Kinsey Millhone is still unknown to her, Grafton says

Last week Sue Grafton invited fans to guess the title of the 23rd novel in her alphabet series starring beloved private investigator Kinsey Millhone.

Did you guess W is for Wasted? If you didn't you were "W is for Wrong." More than 5,700 fans participated online for a chance to win an advance reader's copy of the book. Fewer than 50 guessed Wasted.

Other guesses included wicked, witness, wrath and whodunit.

Grafton spoke with USA TODAY's Carol Memmott about W is for Wasted (to be published on Sept. 10) and the remaining books in the series. And don't miss this exclusive peak at the book jacket.

Q. Why did you ask readers to guess the title?

A. For one thing, my readers are so caught up in this whole process. They enjoy trying to outwit me, so I thought, let's just give them a chance to participate. One website stated incorrectly that the contest was for readers to choose the title and I about fainted because there's no way I could open it up in that manner. Because who's going to guess what I'm writing about or how a title would apply?

Q: How does "Wasted" link to the novel's plot?

A: I think my use of the word is if you're drunk or out of it on drugs. You know, you're so wasted you can't stand up straight. And I am writing about a clinical trial and I'm writing about the homeless — two or three of the fellows participate in this study. And mostly it's the notion of all the waste in crime. Murder is a waste. There is just a sense that there's such a loss when it comes down to criminal behavior. So part of it is metaphorical, if you'll forgive me. I hate to use snooty words.

Q: Was this title hard to come up with?

A.: There did turn out to be quite a few usable words, so that was not an issue in itself. It's usually just a question of what is going to apply. O was a hideous problem because obituary, for instance, does not translate into other languages. And obit didn't sound right and it didn't have any meaning. So my husband came up with the word outlaw and that worked. And with W, I made a list as I always do as I began work on the book, just so that I had a sense of the words that might play into the storytelling process. And then at a certain point I settled on the term wasted.

Q: So you have to keep in mind whether the title will translate to a "W" word in other languages?

A: Often one of the main characters will have a name that starts with the letter of the alphabet so like in C is for Corpse there was Bobby Callahan and in some countries it was called C is for Callahan. And in some languages, there are certain letters that don't exist so I have to leave that to them to solve.

Q: We're wrong to think you already have titles in mind for the rest of the books in the series?

A: I know Z is for Zero, over and out. X is an interesting letter, but I don't know of a crime that starts with X. I'm hoping somebody will get busy on that. I'm waiting to see. Again there are certain odd words — xenophobe or xenophopia is the only term, that being a hatred of foreigners, that at least suggests a motive for murder. So I may end up, by default, using that.

Q: So you don't have the remaining books written and stashed away for future publication?

A: I do not. I'm lucky if I can figure out what's happening on the next page. I do a lot of note taking, I plan very carefully, and my books are very carefully structured. But there are so many surprises and so many unanswered questions when I start to work. Which makes me very nervous although if I knew all the answers I'd be bored to death. So maybe part of the thrill of it is hoping I'll get through it one more time.

Q: Do you know where Kinsey will end up when the last page of Z is for Zero is written?

A: I don't, and I have often said, "I don't tell her, she tells me." She assures me it's none of my business. But I will not kill her off. My readers are already worried about that — "please don't kill her off." I'm going, "Are you nuts? Why would I kill this woman?" She's adorable. She has been so much fun in my life because she's so naughty. But certainly whatever we do in Z is for Zero I will round it out and at least suggest life after the end of the alphabet. What she will do with herself, whether she'll end up married, joining the Foreign Legion ... I don't know what she will do. I don't need to know because it will take me six more years.

Q: Fans still have to wait for a Kinsey book to be published every two years?

A: Yes, because I'm slow. I'm very steady. I'm the tortoise as opposed to the hare. I do not write two books a year. I'm lucky to scramble out one. And I work, I promise you, every day. So it's not like I'm goofing off. I'm just so slow. I work through trial and error. I go down many roads that turn out to be dead ends. So I back up and try another approach. What I do know after all these many years is I know what doesn't work. So when I try a strategy or try a move I know if it's not working. I don't waste a lot of time going down dead-end roads, but I waste more than you'd imagine. And yet it isn't a waste. You discover something whichever direction you take.

Q: So fans will have to be satisfied knowing each book is your very best effort?

A: You would not have any respect for me the next morning if I went dashing through, slapdash, just cobbling together old plots. It would ruin it. My joy, to date, is that each book is crafted a little bit differently, the setup for each case is different and I try to deal with different subject matters. I don't want to write the same book 26 times. So far I'm on the track for that.

View the original article here

Rod Serling's daughter goes beyond the 'Twilight Zone'

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

Anne Serling talks about her father, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, and the new biography of him that she finally felt ready to write. “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling,” is in stores April 30, 2013.

Anne Serling sits with her father, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling. She has written a book about him as she knew him, titled "As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling." (Photo: Gannett)

Serling kept grueling work schedule, daughter notesHe always made time for family outingsSerling, 50, died of a heart attack in 1975

Those of us who knew Rod Serling only through 50 years of Twilight Zone reruns have a definite picture of the man in our minds.

As an episode ends and the last twist of the tale is revealed, the camera pans over to where the show's creator has waited just off-screen. His hair is jet-black, his eyes piercing. A cigarette is often wedged between his fingers, the smoke curling around him as he delivers the story's epilogue with deep-voiced staccato precision. He seems omniscient as he makes his closing argument about human nature to the millions of viewers across the nation, offering one final thought before the credits roll.

That somewhat ominous image made Serling an American icon, and the many skirmishes with network executives and sponsors who tried to censor his work led to his reputation as "the Angry Young Man of Television."

But in her new memoir, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, daughter Anne Serling offers a behind-the-scenes view from her childhood with stories of his humor and his devotion to his family. She tells of her famous father addressing loving notes to her as "Miss Grumple" and signing them "Roddy Rabbit," recalls him acting out impromptu scenes from Gone With the Wind (playing all the roles himself and using whatever props were on hand) and notes his fondness for pranks.

"He was literally the funniest person I ever met, and he would do anything for a practical joke," she said during a recent interview at her Cayuga Heights, N.Y., home.

"When people saw this black-and-white image walking across the MGM soundstage with a cigarette and the tight lips and that serious expression, you wouldn't have known that he was very self-deprecating and extremely hilarious."

Few knew Serling

In some ways, As I Knew Him, released April 30 by Kensington Books, is Anne Serling's answer to previous biographies that painted a troubled soul "so remotely unfamiliar to me and distant from the dad that I knew." Her book begins with his final days at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., where he had been taken after a heart attack at the family's cottage on Cayuga Lake. He was 50 years old, Anne barely 20.

After revisiting a few memories of summers on the lake, the story rewinds to Rodman Edward Serling's birth in Syracuse, N.Y., on Christmas Day 1924 and his family's move two years later to Binghamton, where his father opened a grocery. The Parlor City — which escaped the brunt of the Depression thanks to Endicott Johnson and IBM Corp. — provided an idyllic childhood filled with carefree summer nights and carousel rides, and he would later incorporate his yearning for those days into the autobiographical Twilight Zone classic Walking Distance.

The real world intruded when the United States entered World War II after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which spurred Serling and a few of his Binghamton High School classmates to join the military right after graduation. As a Jew, Serling hoped to fight Nazis in Europe, but instead became a paratrooper in the Pacific theater.

In the battle for Leyte — some of the fiercest fighting of the war — many of Serling's comrades were killed, and bomb shrapnel hit his wrist and knee. The injuries earned him a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, but would plague him for the rest of his life.

The psychological scars would never fade either: "What I vividly recall is my dad having nightmares, and in the morning I would ask him what happened, and he would say he dreamed the Japanese were coming at him. So it was always present, and clearly — as he said — he got it off his chest in his writing."

Indeed, many of his best scripts for The Twilight Zone and other anthology shows would explore the trauma of war: A Quality of Mercy imagines a bloodthirsty American soldier learning a lesson by trading places with his Japanese counterpart, and The Purple Testament imagines a G.I. who can see which of his platoon members will be the next to die.

Serling faced another blow just as the war ended: the death of his father, Sam, of a heart attack at 52. The Army did not grant Serling emergency leave, and he could not return to Binghamton for the funeral. "It is a loss of such magnitude," his daughter writes, "that he will never truly recover."

As I Knew Him then sketches out Serling's life after the war, as a student at Antioch College in Ohio (where he met and married his wife, Carol) and later as a struggling writer for radio. It was in the emerging television industry, though — specifically, anthology shows that constantly require new scripts — where Serling found his success. He launched into the upper stratosphere of TV writers with the 1955 broadcast of Patterns, a story centered on cutthroat corporate politics that rings true even today. He earned critical acclaim and an Emmy Award, and Kraft Television Theatre restaged the live production three weeks after its initial airing — the first "rerun" of the television era.

In 1956, the Playhouse 90 production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, starring Jack Palance as washed-up boxer "Mountain" McClintock, cemented his popularity and earned his second Emmy.

By her count, Anne Serling has documented that her father wrote 252 scripts between 1950 and 1975 — a breakneck pace that's nearly one script per month. After he achieved a measure of success, he accomplished this feat partly by acting out the scripts into a Dictaphone and letting a secretary transcribe them. Even so, the pace was grueling.

Balancing work and family

In a 1959 interview with journalist Mike Wallace, aired as The Twilight Zone began production, Serling said he was working 12 hours a day for seven days a week just to keep up with the enormous task of having complete creative control of a TV series. Before the show ended in 1964, he wrote 92 of 156 episodes.

Anne Serling talks about her memories of her father, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, during a March 28 interview in Cayuga Heights, N.Y. She has written a book about him as she knew him, titled "As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling." (Photo: Simon Wheeler, The Ithaca Journal)

Still, Anne always felt that she and her older sister, Jodi, had their father's full attention whenever they wanted it, and that he shielded the girls from the many stresses of his Hollywood job.

"I was aware that he got up very early in the morning, but he was always there at the dinner table and he was there when I came home from school," she said. "We could sometimes play basketball — quite a lot, actually. I never had the sense that my father wasn't available."

Anne Serling's childhood memories are alive and engaging, whether they are joyous — watching The Flintstones with her dad, investigating his office looking for sweets and caring for the family's various pets — or more somber, such as the day President John F. Kennedy was shot or how her family coped with her great-grandmother's death. Particularly vivid are times spent on Cayuga Lake, when Serling could slow down a bit and find more time for family activities. He also taught courses at Ithaca College, imparting his experience in the television business to the next generation.

"It was so different from the pace of Los Angeles. My mother had gone there every year of her life, and then my parents had their honeymoon there," Anne Serling said. "It was a place to unwind and relax — there wasn't that constant frenzy. Even though he was still writing at the lake, it wasn't the same pace and he could relax."

In the late 1960s, her father moved beyond The Twilight Zone, creating a short-lived Western series called The Loner as well as hosting and writing for the 1970-73 series Night Gallery; the latter became a disheartening experience because of clashes with producers over the show's direction and tone.

Despite warning signs — some more obvious in hindsight — Rod Serling continued on the writing treadmill and suffered his first heart attack in May 1975. After a second one two weeks later, doctors decided to perform open-heart surgery, then still a new procedure. From his hospital bed, he told Anne he was confident — but to his doctor, he darkly joked, "I think my survival chances may have been better in the war."

His words were sadly prophetic: Rod Serling died in the hospital days later.

Grief and reflection

Her father's sudden death sent Anne into depression. For many years, she suffered from what she calls "complicated grief," becoming agoraphobic and numb, shunning emotional ties. As I Knew Him describes her slow emergence from the darkness, aided by therapy and the love of her husband, Doug — and in the fall of 1983, she finally revisited his grave in the cemetery near the Cayuga Lake cottage, where she found someone added a simple yet profound message: "He left friends."

"Maybe I find some comfort in this message left behind," she writes. "Perhaps there is some element of peace, at last, not only in the realization that I have finally done this, but also in the quiet and the recognition that I don't need to be here to find my father."

She began to look for her dad in the work he left behind, watching The Twilight Zone and finding echoes of times they had spent together.

Looking back on his career, Rod Serling famously said that "good writing, like wine, has to age well, and my stuff has been momentarily adequate." He even sold off the rights to his greatest work, The Twilight Zone, because he never thought it would recoup the money his production company had spent to make it.

His daughter thinks that he'd be stunned to know that his stories live on, through TV marathons on holidays, a 1980s Twilight Zone film, several attempts at re-launching the series, and even a theme park thrill ride. The best Twilight Zone moments have become cultural touchstones, from Burgess Meredith's broken glasses and "it's a cookbook!" to Talky Tina and the lonely hitchhiker. The show that was never a ratings success has become the standard against which other science fiction shows are measured.

Anne Serling wrote the book "As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling." Her father Rod Serling created "Twilight Zone." (Photo: Gannett)

Conscious legacy

His greatest legacy, perhaps, is the social conscience he instilled in his work — and because human nature does not change, those ideas are rediscovered by each generation.

"I hear from people in their 20s and early 30s who, because of my dad, became writers. That would have also deeply touched him."

What would Serling think of life in 2013? After all, we're living in a future stranger than any Twilight Zone episode could have predicted 50 years ago. His daughter believes he'd be intrigued and appalled by what television offers today — so much more than the mere three networks of 1975 — and he would see the opportunities that those other outlets and the Internet offer to get his stories out to viewers without interference from meddling sponsors.

And who knows — with a little technological boost, Rod Serling might have produced even more tales to entertain us and make us think about our role in the world.

"I often wonder today, with a computer, how much more prolific he would have been," she said, "Once he mastered the computer, which would have been a little bit of a challenge, because he wasn't mechanically inclined — but once he mastered it, I think he would have loved it."

View the original article here

Amanda Knox: 'I have a life that I want to live'

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

The Amanda Knox case spawned numerous books looking at whether she's guilty or innocent. (Photo: Scott Eklund, Red Box Pictures, for USA TODAY)

In a five-hour interview, she details lessons she's learnedAn ABC special on her case airs at 10 ET TuesdayIn worst-case scenario, Italy could seek her extradition and force her to finish her 26-year prison term there

SEATTLE — As always, waiting was the hardest part.

Amanda Knox was waiting last month to hear the verdict from Italy's highest court on her case, the sensational murder charges that had put the American exchange student in prison for four years before an appeals court reversed her conviction. Now back home, too anxious to stay in her small downtown apartment, she went to her mother's house with her boyfriend and best friend. Her father and stepmother stopped over.

They decided to pass the time by watching a movie, settling on The Hunger Games.

Watching the story of a post-apocalyptic world didn't exactly calm her nerves, "but it definitely was distracting, at the very least," Knox says ruefully. The science-fiction film was forgotten when her lawyer called from Rome at 2 a.m. with news all too real. The Court of Cassation had ruled she would have to stand trial again for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher.

"It had gone as we had not foreseen and exactly as we had hoped against," Knox said quietly in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY about her new book, Waiting to Be Heard, released today by HarperCollins. "It's just this thing that's laying so heavy on my heart right now."

It was the first sit-down, face-to-face interview Knox had done with a reporter, followed by other interviews about her book with People magazine and ABC News' Diane Sawyer. An ABC special, Murder. Mystery. Amanda KnoxSpeaks, airs at 10 ET tonight.

Her dream, however distant, of having Kercher's parents take her to visit Meredith's grave are on hold. Instead, she ruminates about returning to Italy for the new trial — her presence isn't required — as a statement of what is at stake for her. The coming courtroom battles in Florence and Rome and, potentially, the United States may well stretch into years.

"I thought there was an end to the field of barbed wire, and it's like it was just the hill," she says, fighting back tears. She had reached "a crest" only to see more peril ahead before she finally might clear her name, reclaim her life and move on.

The decision to order a new trial came as Knox has returned to school at the University of Washington, started a long-term relationship with a musician boyfriend, eased the panic attacks she suffered in prison and afterward, and finished a book detailing her experiences and what she learned from them about perseverance and public identity.

WISH LIST: What Amanda Knox wrote in her journal

BOOK LIST: Various takes on the Amanda Knox case

INTERVIEW: Excerpts from Amanda Knox's interview with USA TODAY

COURTS: Legal case against Amanda Knox not closed

The 463-page book chronicles her version of a story that has transfixed tabloid newspapers and cable TV on two continents. Italian prosecutors portrayed her as a manipulative, promiscuous "Foxy Knoxy" who helped kill her roommate when a sex-and-drug game went awry. She has become instantly recognizable and notorious, lumped in a skit on Saturday Night Live two weeks ago with the Unabomber and the Menendez brothers.

She portrays herself as a naive kid far from home who found herself enmeshed in a spiraling nightmare, the victim of an errant prosecution. Independent analysts have concluded that the microscopic DNA that helped convict her and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was mishandled and unreliable. She blames herself for misjudgments and missteps, especially for signing a statement indicating she was at the scene during the murder and implicating an innocent man. She says she did so only after a long and abusive interrogation and quickly recanted it.

After an interview in her hometown that stretches for five hours, it is hard to reconcile the prosecutors' picture of a depraved murderer with the lithe, earnest 25-year-old trying to regain her footing. She had left Seattle in 2007 as a college junior eager for adventure and determined to learn a new language at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy. Four years later, she returned graver, warier and fluent in the Italian she ended up perfecting in prison.

She didn't cancel the long-scheduled session with USA TODAY despite the unexpected bad news from the Italian court five days earlier.

"This is my way of speaking up for myself," she says. Doing the interview is a chore to be endured, she says, but after the travails of the past few years, "I don't dread a whole heck of a lot. The only thing that I could really say is similar to dread is this waiting, and this not knowing what's going to happen. Waiting was always the hardest part."

'Waiting to Be Heard' by Amanda Knox (Photo: Handout)

AN IMPISH SIDE

Her quirky manner and delicate beauty was one reason Amanda Knox initially drew the suspicion of Italian law-enforcement officials. Her photogenic face, catnip for the paparazzi, helped ignite feverish coverage of her arrest and trial. The author of one of the dozen books about her case wrote that she bore "an uncanny resemblance to Perugia's Madonna." Shoulder-length brown hair frames her oval face. She has blue eyes and a wide grin, though she flashes it less often than she once did.

An impish side still occasionally breaks through. During a photo-taking session at a local park, she tries to loosen her staged pose using advice a photographer friend once gave her. "Squirm!" she shouts at herself, jumping and wiggling, then settling with a smile at the camera.

During an extended sit-down interview, though, she is contained, serious and still. She pauses to ponder questions and audibly exhales in relief when she finishes an answer. She responds directly even at times when her lawyers (who weren't present) might have preferred a dodge.

Will she return to Italy for her retrial?

"My lawyers have said that I don't have to and that I don't need to. I'm still considering it, to be honest," she replies. She has been turning it over in her mind since the court decision. "It's scary, the thought. But it's also important for me to say, 'This is not just happening far away from and doesn't matter to me.' So, somehow, I feel it's important for me to convey that. And if my presence is what is necessary to convey that, then I'll go."

She added that she wanted to understand the legal risks before making a decision. Now her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, has announced that Knox won't return to Italy for it.

Amanda Knox is driven to court at midnight Dec. 5, 2009, to hear the sentence in her murder trial. Knox and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher. (Photo: File photo by Franco Origlia, Getty Images)

Her legal future is full of uncertainty. The Italian high court has another two months before it's required to release a decision explaining its ruling. The justices' reasoning will help shape the retrial at an appeals court in Florence. That verdict, for conviction or acquittal, could be appealed again to the high court.

In her worst-case scenario — if the appeals court convicts her, and the high court upholds that conviction — Italy could seek her extradition from the United States to finish her 26-year prison term, set by the trial court in 2009.

The negotiations over that might become a diplomatic and legal showdown that breaks ground in transnational law. "National boundaries are counting much less today as we travel more, so we're going to see more of this," Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz says. "But we haven't seen a case like this" before.

For Knox, concerns about a conviction are, naturally, more personal.

"There's always a possibility, is my understanding of the way it works, just because there are human failings in a justice system," she says. "I would hope that, should that ever happen — and I don't think it will — people would still believe in me no matter what a legal system says when it's wrong. That would be my hope. I don't know if it would mean they would take me back to prison. I don't know." She pauses.

"I sincerely hope not, and I have a life that I want to live, I want to have the right to live. And I guess the one thing that I can say is, I've already confronted in my mind the thought that I would never leave prison."

American college student Amanda Knox was convicted in an Italian court of murder. She was later cleared. She has written a book about her experiences. (Photo: Scott Eklund, Red Box Pictures for USA TODAY)

MAKING TO-DO LISTS

The night before her initial conviction was overturned by an appeals court, Knox drew a line down a page in her journal. She wrote side-by-side lists of what she would do under the possible outcomes: if she was acquitted, if her 26-year sentence was affirmed, and if she was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

If she could return home to Seattle right away, she put eight items on a wish list, from getting an apartment with her best friend — done — to repaying her parents and grandmother for the loans and mortgages they took out to pay her legal fees. (The $3.8 million advance she got for her book has gone a long way toward fulfilling that.) Now, a year and a half later, she has completed or at least taken some steps toward each item on the list. She has been in a relationship with her musician boyfriend, James Terrano, for more than a year.

If she had to complete her sentence, with the prospect of getting out of prison when she was in her 40s, she listed eight other goals, from graduating long-distance from the University of Washington — "even possible?" she wrote to the side — to getting a better job in prison.

She added three more items if she was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. She would stop writing letters home, she wrote, and she put question marks after two others. "Ask family and friends to forget me?" And: "Suicide?"

Other prisoners had attempted suicide while she was there, some successfully and others not. She knew the most reliable way to try, using a plastic bag. "I have a great amount of respect for life and I always think that no matter how bad situations get, you can always make something out of it," she says in the interview. But it is possible to get to the point of being "so sad that you don't even want to try."

"That is the thing that I was scared of — that I would know intellectually that there's something to glean out of life, but that I would be so broken that I wouldn't care. I just wouldn't want to fight anymore."

The next day, the appeals court set her free, prompting cheers from some in the courtroom and boos from others. Experts appointed by the appeals court had concluded that the DNA samples found on the purported murder weapon and a bra clasp — the most important physical evidence against Knox and Sollecito — were too small to be conclusively matched to anyone. Some of the evidence had been mishandled and potentially tainted by investigators.

(Other DNA evidence helped convict Rudy Guede, now 26, of the murder; the Ivory Coast drifter and petty criminal is now serving a 16-year sentence. Prosecutors argue Knox and Sollecito acted in concert with him; the defense argues he acted alone.)

Knox was rushed back to the prison for her things. Guards returned the passport they had seized four years earlier. "I didn't recognize my passport photo," she writes in her book, seeing a picture of a "younger me" ready to set off for Italy. "I felt sad to see her. I wanted to say, 'You have no idea what's going to happen to you.'"

Knox is emotional as she returns to home to Seattle in 2011. (Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)

'WHAT DO YOU DO?'

These days, one of Knox's favorite hangouts is a tea house near her apartment in the funky International District in downtown Seattle, on the ground floor of the historic Panama Hotel, opened in 1910. On this afternoon, the proprietor, Jan Johnson, has brought out some snapshots that show the empty space before it had been converted into a brick-lined retreat for tea and espresso.

Knox is admiring the pictures when Johnson notices the reporter and photographer trailing her. "What do you do?" she asks with friendly curiosity. Knox, accustomed to encountering strangers who know altogether too much about her, seems surprised at the anonymity. "I'm a writer," she finally replies, smiling.

At the same time, though, teenagers at a table are elbowing one another and pointing at Knox. A girl snaps a photo on her cellphone, then shows her friends, giggling.

Knox often wears glasses, in part because she became increasingly nearsighted in prison and in part because it makes her less recognizable. When she returned to classes at the University of Washington, to her discomfort some students would take her picture in class and post it on Twitter; that rarely happens anymore. In her creative-writing class, she sometimes writes on themes drawn from her days in prison, and it is no longer such a big deal to anyone, she says.

When she first arrived in Seattle, she suffered nightmares and panic attacks. Her family worried that she might have post-traumatic stress disorder. She reluctantly agreed to see a counselor, who urged her to talk about whatever she liked.

"I started talking about the here-and-now, about the things that I went through, just the things that I was struggling with — like I was disappointing the people I loved because I wasn't the same person anymore," she recalls. "And I worried and I feared that I was disappointing them by not coming back quite the same."

Amanda Knox spoke with USA TODAY about her new book, "Waiting to Be Heard," what could bring her closure and how she's been changed by her sensational murder trial and four years in an Italian prison. (Photo: Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures for USA TODAY)

Suddenly she found herself weeping uncontrollably and feeling trapped. She called her boyfriend, who picked her up. She never went back.

HOPING FOR CLOSURE

Knox insists she had no involvement in this grisly crime against a roommate she describes as a friend. She felt a natural kinship with her 21-year-old British roommate, she says, both adventurous young women with divorced parents. She disputes accounts that they didn't like one another. She says she was shocked and shaken when Meredith's body, her throat slit and her partially nude body covered with a duvet, was found in the cottage they shared with two young Italian women.

At the time of the murder, she says, she and Sollecito were at his apartment, watching a movie and smoking a joint. ("Marijuana was as common as pasta" for her and her friends in Italy, she writes.)

In her book, Knox walks through each step of her interrogation and piece of evidence for her view of what it means and, in some cases, how she says it was skewed by Italian law-enforcement officials. Police and prosecutors devised a bizarre theory of the murder and refused to be swayed, even in the face of contradictory evidence, she says. At times she blames herself for failing to understand what was happening — for not being as mature, as smart or as strong as the situation demanded.

She hopes her book "shows the growing-up-ness" of the experience, she says. She struggled to stay calm and sane while held in the Capanne prison, fighting for her freedom and leaning on the prison's Catholic chaplain, Don Saulo Scarabattoli. She rebuffed sexual overtures from guards, she says, and avoided provocation from aggressive and unpredictable fellow prisoners.

Questions remain after Italy's top court overturned the 2011 murder acquittal of American student Amanda Knox.

She knows there are those who will never believe she is innocent, possibly including Kercher's family. Of perhaps two dozen books published about her case, she has read only a few, including Meredith, written by father John Kercher and published last spring. In it, Kercher, a British journalist, describes Knox's conviction as hard-won justice.

"It matters to me what Meredith's family thinks," Knox says. "It does affect me — me, and the peace that I have inside." Tears well in her eyes again. "I would hope, like, I really hope that the Kerchers read my book, and they don't have to believe me. I have no right to demand anything of anyone. But I hope they try."

She has hesitated to contact them. "I've always been afraid of just upsetting them, and I feel like as long as there's question of my involvement in Meredith's death, I don't want to impose myself on them." She had thought that reaching out might be possible once Italy's highest court had affirmed her acquittal.

Instead, their decision for a retrial has become one more barrier. She will have to convince another court of her innocence before the case could be closed. "It's this, this, this field of barbed wire that I'm having to crawl through so I can finally get to the side where, OK, we're finally on the same side" as the Kercher family.

"The ideal situation in my mind is that they could show me Meredith's grave. Because it was like, I wasn't allowed to grieve, either, and that would mean a lot to me." An hour later, she raises the same prospect again when asked whether this episode of her life would ever truly be over.

"I really want to go see her grave," she says. "And right now I don't feel like I have the right to without her family's permission. So that's something that I want to work toward to get closure."

She is wearing a small gold necklace of a dove. The chaplain gave it to her the night she was waiting for the appeals-court decision that, it turned out, reversed her conviction.

"He gave it to me to remind me I am free, no matter where I am," she says, touching it like a talisman. "I don't wear it always, but I wear it on important occasions, and when I need to remind myself of that."

View the original article here

Exclusive look: Book trailer for 'The 5th Wave'

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

Book trailer for Rick Yancey's young adult dystopian book 'The 5th Wave.' It's the first in a trilogy.

'The 5th Wave' by Rick Yancey

Are you ready to save the human race?

"After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one."

At the dawn of the 5th wave, Cassie must run from the beings who kill everything they see, living alone to stay alive and hidden. That is, until she meets Evan Walker.

--

Check out the book trailer for Rick Yancey's dystopian book, The 5th Wave. In the young-adult sci-fi novel, the first in a trilogy, orphaned teen Cassie searches for her brother after a deadly alien invasion. Videos for the previous four waves have already been revealed.

The book comes out May 7.

View the original article here

New paperbacks: Hilary Mantel's 'Bring Up the Bodies'

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

'Bring Up The Bodies' by Hilary Mantel

This month's critic's pick is Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Picador, fiction, reprint, on sale Tuesday, * * * * out of four).

"Riveting," USA TODAY's Deirdre Donahue said of this Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Thomas Cromwell.

Also recently released:

The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro (Vintage, non-fiction, reprint). The latest best-selling volume in Caro's epic life of LBJ.

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian (Vintage, fiction, reprint). Novel entwines family story with the Armenian Genocide.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen (Random House, reprint, non-fiction). Essays on topics of interest to women; reissued in time for Mother's Day.

The Black Box by Michael Connelly (Grand Central, fiction, reprint). Detective Harry Bosch reopens a 20-year-old murder case.

Dearie by Bob Spitz (Vintage, non-fiction, reprint). Subtitle: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Back Bay, fiction, reprint). Debut novel about Iraq was a National Book Award finalist.

Gold by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster, fiction, reprint). A mother who is an Olympic hopeful is faced with daughter's illness; by the author of Little Bee.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel (Mariner, non-fiction, reprint). Illustrated memoir about her mother, by the author of Fun Home.

I Hate Everyone … Starting With Me by Joan Rivers (Berkley, non-fiction, reprint). Humorously caustic musings by the host of Fashion Police.

America the Philosophical by Carlin Romano (Vintage, non-fiction, reprint). An unconventional take on America's "philosophers," from William James to Bill Moyers.

View the original article here

Fiction roundup: Sophie Kinsella, Jennifer Gilmore

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

'Wedding Night' by Sophie Kinsella

Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella
The Dial Press, 446 pp.
*** out of four

Lottie's first wrong move: buying her boyfriend, Richard, an engagement ring. Her next mistake: thinking he proposed ... when he just meant he was going on an out-of-town business trip. Her next, really big snafu: dumping Richard and hooking up with old flame Ben and marrying him on a whim. Fans of Sophie Kinsella's comic novels know laughs are about to ensue at the expense of our wrong-headed but adorable heroine. We're whisked off to Greece for a night of connubial bliss that will never happen if Lottie's practical sister, Fliss, has her way. It's a terribly silly but fun novel that's as light and bubbly as a glass of wedding champagne. — Jocelyn McClurg

The Mothers by Jennifer Gilmore
Simon and Schuster, 275 pp.
***

'The Mothers' by Jennifer Gilmore

Jennifer Gilmore mines her own experiences with domestic adoption for her third novel, an engrossing story of loss, love and motherhood. After several failed attempts at starting a family, Jesse and Ramon begin the process of open adoption (in which the birth parent or parents are involved), testing both their relationship and their emotional reserves. Gilmore does a wonderful job juxtaposing society's often unrealistic expectations of what a mother should be with characters who represent more realistic portrayals of what motherhood really is. The reader goes on a roller-coaster ride with the prospective parents and is left wondering: Is there only one path to becoming and being a mother?— Mary Cadden

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Scribner, 383 pp.

***

'The Flamethrowers' by Rachel Kushner

The fearless if naïve narrator of Rachel Kushner's sensual, intense and political novel, set in the 1970s, is a young woman known only as Reno, because that's where she is from. She loves fast motorcycles and race cars and wants to create art out of Western landscapes. She notes it's "an irony but a fact that person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West." In New York, she falls for an older and successful Italian artist who persuades her to visit Italy, where Reno is entangled in radical politics and a deadly kidnapping. The Flamethrowers' appeal is its dazzling, fluid prose more than a plot that turns elusive. Its last line is: "Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question." Kushner is a writer for readers who don't need all the answers but welcome the next question. — Bob Minzesheimer

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
Graywolf Press, 325 pp.
** ½

'Woke Up Lonely' by Fiona Maazel

In her ambitious if confusing second novel, Fiona Maazel wrestles with the central irony of modern life: Despite technological hyperconnectedness, people ache with loneliness. And nothing — relationships, family life, casual sex, 24/7 TV — alleviates this pandemic of isolation. The complicated plot involves spies, government agencies, dysfunctional families, hostages, and, yes, North Korea. At the center is a cult leader named Thurlow Dan. Offering to cure loneliness, his organization, Helix, is becoming a threat in the eyes of the government. The talented Maazel has plenty of imagination, but her novel is relentlessly bleak. For serious fans of experimental fiction only. — Deirdre Donahue

View the original article here

Actress Lauren Graham writes a 'girly' debut novel

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

Lauren Graham, star of NBC's 'Parenthood,' says that she wrote a book of fiction, 'Someday, Someday, Maybe,' because it would be more fun than real stories.

Actress Lauren Graham has written a novel about an aspiring actress. (Photo: Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY)

A 'girly book' about emotions and 'no sports'On dating her on-screen brother from 'Parenthood'Finding the time to do 'something else' than acting

NEW YORK — The dining room at Sardi's, the legendary Broadway restaurant, is "beautiful, with burgundy walls and little yellow shaded lamps on all the tables," just like actress Lauren Graham describes it in her debut novel.

In a scene in Someday, Someday, Maybe (Ballantine, on sale Tuesday), Graham's narrator, a 26-year-old aspiring actress, finds Sardi's menu "extravagantly expensive" and the atmosphere "intimidating."

In real life, Graham, 46, doesn't mention the cost of her chicken Caesar salad ($22.50) and seems at home lunching at Sardi's. A cartoon drawing of her is on the wall, amid hundreds of other celebrity caricatures, everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Hugh Jackman.

Graham is best known for two TV series, Gilmore Girls and Parenthood, yet it was her role in a 2009 Broadway revival of the musical Guys and Dolls — as Adelaide, the perennial fiancée — that earned her a place on Sardi's walls. "One of those dreams," she says, "and then, it happens."

She's here's to talk about her novel about the improbable dreams of making it as actor. Graham, whose love of performing began with school plays in suburban Virginia, began writing it two years ago, after finding herself "with the time and room to do something else."

Graham's novel traces a year in the life of aspiring actress Franny Banks.

She had neither during her breakout role as a hip mom in Gilmore Girls from 2000 to 2007. "That really launched my career," she says, "but the hours were just insane, 12, 14 hours, day after day. At one point, my agent even called and asked if this was allowed."

The just-renewed Parenthood, in which she plays a divorced mom of two who moves back in with her parents, is less demanding. "It's more of an ensemble. I work maybe three days a week. I had time to do something that didn't rely so much on other people."

Set in 1995, Graham's novel traces a year in the life of Franny Banks, who's funny but insecure. Graham calls it a "girly book" that will appeal more to women than men. "It's about emotions and there's no sports, to cite a cliché."

Graham's editor, Jennifer Smith, says, "I wouldn't call it girly. Like many novels, it will appeal to women, but it's got a lot in it about hopes and dreams and being young in New York and desperately wanting something." Although Graham is well-known as an actress, Smith considers her "a new voice that's funny and charming."

Graham says her novel autobiographical in "only the most general way. I went out of my way to make sure that the characters did not resemble anyone I know. The agent is not my agent. The boyfriend is not my boyfriend,"

She adds, "I was so not interested in writing any kind of tell-all. If I wanted to do that, I would have just written a memoir and probably sold more copies." She laughs.

She finds it's more challenging and fun "to make stuff up. Of course, it's a world I know. I was most interested in those tiny beats or steps that get you on your way when you're so unsure about your career."

Like her narrator, Graham waitressed in a comedy club and shared a Brooklyn apartment.

Graham plays Sarah Braverman in the NBC series 'Parenthood.' (Photo: Danny Feld NBC)

She now "lives wherever I'm working," but has an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Los Angeles she shares with her boyfriend, actor Peter Krause, who plays her older brother in Parenthood. (As for dating her on-screen brother, Graham, who has never married, says only, "It's nice when you meet someone you work with and it works out.")

She wanted the novel to explore "the emotional journey, the kind of growth that happens to a young girl in her 20s."

In her 20s, Graham majored in English at Barnard College in New York, got a master's degree in acting from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, performed in summer stock, and between auditions, taught SAT prep classes in New York.

She was 28 when she landed her first TV role, a guest spot on Caroline in the City, which led to appearances on 3rd Rock From the Sun and Law & Order. In an episode of Seinfeld, she played a prospective girlfriend of Jerry's who tries to get to the top of his speed dial. Since then, whenever she sees Seinfeld, she says, "He goes, 'Hey, Speed Dial.' He actually remembers me."

As Graham's novel opens, Franny has six months left on a deal she made with herself, "when I first came to New York — that I'd see what I could accomplish in three years, but if I wasn't well on my way to having a real career as an actor by then, I absolutely, positively wouldn't keep at it after that." It's not looking promising, at least at first.

Lauren Graham chats about 'Someday, Someday, Maybe' at Sardi's in New York, which is a used as a setting in the book. (Photo: Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY)

Graham says she never had such a deadline, "but there was always a sense of urgency and an awareness of some kind of ticking clock. Even then, it didn't take a lot of experience to notice that most of the roles were for people in their 20s and early 30s. In general, I don't think acting is a career where you ever feel there's plenty of time."

In the novel, Franny is reminded of the odds against making it. "Of course I know how competitive it is to be a working actor," Franny says, "because all anyone tells you is how competitive it is and how only 5 percent of any of the union members make enough money to live on, and out of those 5 percent only 2 percent make a lot of money."

Graham recalls, "When I was starting out, you'd always hear those kind of stories. They seemed meant to discourage you. But that was then. Now, everyone is encouraged to follow their dreams without really paying your dues. It doesn't seem realistic, but that's how it is."

She attributes that to shows such as American Idol that are "so fame-based. All we had, when I was young, was Star Search," a talent show hosted by Ed McMahon from 1983 to 1995. With a laugh, she adds, "and that didn't make it seem all that appealing."

At lunch, Graham resists drawing parallels between her novel and her life. She and her fictional narrator both were raised by single fathers.

In the novel, Franny was 12 when her mother died in a car accident. Graham was 5 when her mother divorced her father and moved away, but Graham says, "We later had a relationship. It was complicated, but it's not at all like the book."

She plans to write another novel, "not exactly a sequel," but with some of the same characters. First, however, she's finishing a movie.

In A Friggin' Christmas Miracle, to be released in December, Graham plays Joel McHale's wife as they visit his father, played by Robin Williams, and his family of misfits. As Graham puts it, "Hilarity ensues."

View the original article here

Book 13 marks the end of Sookie Stackhouse series

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

'Dead Ever After' by Charlaine Harris is the final book in the series.

Paranormal series features vampires, werewolves and other creaturesSeries inspired HBO's hit series 'True Blood'Harris' next novel is about a pawn shop in Texas

The Sookie Stackhouse saga comes to an end on May 7 with the publication of Dead Ever After (Ace), the 13th novel in Charlaine Harris' paranormal series about the telepathic Bon Temps, La., waitress whose story is the inspiration for HBO's True Blood. In this final chapter, a shocking murder rocks Bon Temps and Sookie is arrested for the crime. Harris, 61, spoke with USA TODAY's Carol Memmott about Sookie's final chapter and what's up next:

Q: The Sookie series has so many fans. Why end it now?

A: I've just come to the end of that particular road. I didn't have a complete story arc in mind, but probably by the second book, I had an idea where I wanted the books to end. I began to feel the creativity of the series was wearing thin and I hate to keep on writing characters when I've lost my love for them. So it seemed time to end the series while I was still happy with what I was doing.

Q: You haven't fallen out of love with Sookie, have you?

A: Oh gosh, no, but I just don't want to ruin her by keeping on writing her when the thrill of it is gone.

Q: Do you think the ending of Dead Ever After will please fans?

A: There's just no way. I hope they will be, but there are a lot of real strong partisans for one or the other of the possible endings. I just realized a few books ago that there was no way I could make everybody happy so I just had to settle on doing what I thought was right.

Q: Do fans let you know how they feel when they don't like what happens to the characters in your books?

A: Oh boy. That's the fun thing and sometimes the scary thing about being me. Like all other writers I want everyone to tell me every book I've written is just great. I know that's not going to happen. I just think it's such a credit to the characters that people are so invested in them. I really see that as a wonderful thing though sometimes it seems like people maybe aren't even reading the same book I wrote. But I guess every book is like that. Once it leaves you, it's never going to be the same book you thought you wrote.

Charlaine Harris' paranormal series about telepathic Bon Temps, La., waitress Sookie Stackhouse is the inspiration for HBO's 'True Blood.' (Photo: John P. Johnson)

Q: What are you working on post-Sookie?

A: I wrote a little coda book for the Sookie books (After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse, October 2013) because there's just no way I could write a book with all the characters that people really care about and say what happened to them after the books ended. So I thought I would close a few threads by saying well this is what happened to other characters like Jason and Michele.

Q: Is there a novel in your near future?

A: I'm working on my next book. I'm about 200 pages into that (a spring 2014 release is planned). It's about a pawn shop in Texas and I've signed a three-book contract. I don't usually talk a lot about what I'm in the process of doing, but it is paranormal.

Q: Anything else?

A: Toni Kelner and I co-edit anthologies every year and I've been working on that, which requires wearing a completely different hat. This one is Weird World of Sports (planned for a winter 2014 release). We've got ice skating, we've got roller derby, we've got baseball, we've got softball, we have hide and seek. It's wonderful what writers can come up with if you give them two elements — a story about sports with paranormal creatures in it. It's delightful how different they are.

Q: Why does the paranormal genre remain so popular?

A: I think it's because there are so many excellent writers in the field. Also, traditionally, in depressed economic times, stories with elements of the supernatural become much more popular. And I think we've been in depressed economic times. I hope that we're pulling out of them, but I think everyone wants a little vacation and that's what these books provide.

Q: What do you like to do when you're not writing?

Charlaine Harris has written Sookie Stackhouse novels. (Photo: Sigrid Estrada)

A: I read a lot. I have not a to-be-read pile but a to-be-read bookshelf. That was one of the treats I gave myself when I started making actual money — to buy any book I felt like buying.

Q: What's on your reading list this summer?

A: I just read my friend Dana Cameron's new book Seven Kinds of Hell and I loved that. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Kate Atkinson's new book Life After Life. She just can't write a bad book. She's just so fabulous. And I'm looking forward to the next Dexter book (Dexter's Final Cut by Jeff Lindsay, Sept. 17).

Q: Any travel in your future?

A: The Edgar Awards banquet, which is roughly like the Oscars for the mystery world, is in early May in New York. I'm the president this year so I get to wear a sequin jacket and sparkles and kind of emcee it a little bit.

Q: HBO's True Blood (starring Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer) returns for its sixth season on June 16. Will you continue watching?

A: Oh sure, although the show doesn't have anything to do with the books. The first season was pretty close to the books and then after that it began deviating more wildly. Alan Ball had themes he wanted to explore which probably weren't the same things that I was exploring to a certain extent. The show has a different show runner now, Brian Buckner, and I'm interested in seeing what he does with the really difficult problems left over from last season. It's like trying to finish a book someone else started, so that's going to be very interesting.

View the original article here

Book Buzz: 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell'... the play?

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

Tucker Max's book 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell' is being adapted into an off-Broadway play. (Photo: Andrew H. Walker Getty Images)

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the book world today:

Star-studded 'Sniper': We already knew that Bradley Cooper would star as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in the movie adaptation of Kyle's memoir American Sniper, and now Steven Spielberg has signed on to direct it. American Sniper has spent 40 weeks on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. Kyle was killed at a Texas shooting range in February.

On the Boston Marathon: Japanese author and six-time Boston Marathoner Haruki Murakami muses on the significance of the race to runners in The New Yorker: "For me, it's through running, running every single day, that I grieve for those whose lives were lost and for those who were injured on Boylston Street. This is the only personal message I can send them."

Best mysteries: Live by Night by Dennis Lehane has won best novel at the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, given annually by the Mystery Writers of America. The Expats by Chris Pavone won best first novel. Check out a full list of winners.

Poems for Mars: Do you think you can write a great haiku? An out-of-this-world haiku? (Excuse the pun. It's Friday.) NASA has launched a poetry contest for "anybody on planet Earth" to write a message to Mars in haiku form. The three favorites will make it to the red planet on NASA's MAVEN spacecraft in November.

'Beer' on tap: The amount of frat boy humor is about to spike in the theater industry. Tucker Max's 2009 book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is being adapted into an off-Broadway play. It's not the best-selling book's first adaptation: USA TODAY's Claudia Puig panned the movie, writing, "This unfunny, über-misogynistic adaptation of Tucker Max's audacious best seller of the same name is unlikely to please anyone."

Sylvia Plath drafts: Up for auction next week are drafts of one of Sylvia Plath's final poems before she committed suicide in 1963. Author Olivia Cole analyzes the dark themes in the drafts and what they reveal about the elusive Plath. For those fascinated by the author of The Bell Jar, Olivia Barker reviews the new book Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953.

Want more Book Buzz? Follow @usatodaybooks and @lindsdee on Twitter.

View the original article here

Gabrielle Reece: From volleyball star to mother

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

Professional vollyball player/model Gabrielle Reece Signs Copies Of Her Book 'My Foot Is Too BIg For The Glass Slipper.' (Photo: Mike Coppola Getty Images)

It's been a few years since volleyball star Gabrielle Reece competed professionally, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been crushing it in myriad other ways: Reece has worked as a fashion model, an ESPN host, a reality TV star and an actress (she played the role of a physical trainer in Gattaca), as well as a health and fitness writer for a number of publications including Yahoo! and Elle. In her bestselling memoir (co-authored with Karen Karbo), Big Girl in the Middle, she recounted her upbringing and career in sports. Now, in her new book with Karbo, My Foot is Too Big for the Glass Slipper, she gives readers a glimpse into her biggest life challenge yet: raising a family. In this exclusive essay for Bookish, Reece describes what being an athlete has taught her about being an "emotional coach" for her daughters and settling disputes with her husband, pro surfer Laird Hamilton. She also dishes on the sports lessons that don't translate as "beautifully" into family life, where there is "no clear winner and loser."

--

My sports background has translated beautifully, and at times awkwardly, into my role as Mom, working woman and loving wife. I can bring an athlete's intensity to even the little things. I can see it now: I lather up with sunblock, put on my best-fitting Lycra pants (you know—the ones that do the anti-gravity thing to your rear) and yell out to my husband, "So what time does sex start?"

BOOKISH: Nia Vardalos on becoming an 'Instant Mom'

BOOKISH: Books by Bravo's 'Real Housewives'

Right out of the gate you learn as an athlete that you'd better be physically conditioned to deal with whatever your opponent doles out. Your opponent in life could be sleepless nights, juggling 13 things at once all with a Vanna White smile or simply trying to keep the girl in the mirror looking like someone you recognize. Given the demands most women are dealing with today, it's helpful to have that kind of conditioning. Here's what I've taken from my life as an athlete into my family life—the good, the bad and the ugly.

Athletics have helped me to develop and maintain discipline. No, I don't mean I get breakfast, lunch and dinner out on the table at precisely the same time every day. I mean the discipline to wait and assess before I react. Let's say my husband and I are about to get into a trivial dispute simply because we've both had a long day. Instead of bickering, I try to look at the end goal and figure out a way to make a game plan to keep the peace and avoid the drama. Sure, if it's something big I want to stand up for, I'm ready to go. However, as the years go by, you start to realize that so few things are really worth hassling over.

BOOKISH: Playing happy families: Parent-kid sporting tales

BOOKISH: Essentials list: Athlete memoirs

BOOKISH: Essentials list: Female athletes

Playing sports taught me to communicate my feelings. Since I played team sports with a bunch of women, there were always a lot of feelings to deal with. Well, now that I have three daughters, there are still feelings floating around. Sometimes kids need an emotional coach. But other times, they just need a mom. There are plenty of instances where my girls don't need strategy or a pep talk—they just need a hug.

When you compete in a sport you learn that even if you and your team are good, you still have to work at it every day. I have been with my husband 17 years, married for 15. I try not to approach our relationship like "I got this." I work really hard at it every day because I know you can't count on relationships to run on automatic pilot. Like sports, family life can be a grind. But if you are willing to take on the doldrums and the challenges, the rewards are so rich.

I learned through athletics to suck it up, and sometimes that's not good. It took me a long time to ask my husband for help or to share my fears or anxieties. I would often just keep feelings pent up inside since I thought I should just handle everything, no matter what. That does work well when you're training, but is not always the best idea for life.

"When you compete in a game, there is a clear winner and loser. That's not always true in life."

All through my teens and 20's I tried to get rid of any shred of self-doubt that held me back from being ruthlessly competitive. Now, as I have glided through my 30's and into my 40's, I've found myself trying to be less harsh with myself, my children, and my husband. I've learned to handle challenges with finesse versus sheer will and aggression.

When you compete in a game, there is a clear winner and loser. That's not always true in life, and this is a lesson from sports I had to unlearn because I found out that two people in a disagreement can actually both be right. What?! No, no, no. I need to win and show you that you're wrong. In my family life, I've learned to let go of being worried about winning at all. Talk about rewiring. Now I think a lot more about the end goal—for me, my girls, my husband—and what's the best way to get there.

--

This article originally appeared on Bookish.com.

BOOKISH: Discover books with Bookish

View the original article here

Book examines 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' under the microscope

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account.

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of 'Mary Lou and Rhoda and Ted.' (Photo: Jesse Jiryu Davis)

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, 38, has spent much of her professional life covering TV and social issues in entertainment. So who better to offer a definitive look at The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), the classic comedy about a young woman making it in the world of TV news? Armstrong does just that in her new book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (Simon & Schuster), out May 7. The L.A.-based author chatted with USA TODAY's Craig Wilson.

Q: What was it about The Mary Tyler Moore Show that captured American viewers so? At its height, a quarter of the total TV viewers in the country were watching.

A: It was the characters in the most basic way. Nobody cares about issues if the characters aren't great. And you can see it in the very beginning with that show. They were great.

Q: So you think it was a perfect storm of people -- as you say, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted?

A: Yes, absolutely. It's those characters and the people who played them, and the people who cast them. It turned into the story of a perfect storm. All these things and all the special combinations.

Q: But don't you think Mary could be a little too sweet at times?

A: Yes. But they were reflecting her personality in the character. My feeling is that in order to be this independent woman, which was a new, mind-blowing thing at the time, she in some ways had to be an exceptionally good girl to be acceptable to the audience.

Q: And that's why you say Mary needed a more earthy Rhoda (Valerie Harper) upstairs?

A: I really think that. I identify with Rhoda. Most of us identify with her. Especially younger women.

Q: And Cloris Leachman, "Phyllis," could be a bit needy at times, a bit pushy, always wanting to be in the game?

The book jacket for 'Mary Lou and Rhoda and Ted' by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong.

A: Cloris is her own special creature and she knows that. She works that. She's brilliant and wacky and unique and her own person. She's a force. She loved being in the action. That's her gift.

Q: One of Lou's lines about Mary has become TV legend -- "You've got spunk...I hate spunk." Why did that seem to sum everything up so?

A: I think it does sum up everything but I'm not sure they knew that at the time. That line gave Ed Asner a lot of trouble. He was too aggressive about it at first, and then he nailed it. He had to be gruff, but also show that his bark was worse than his bite. That's the magic of him. It turned out being very special and unique.

Q: Is it true that Walter Cronkite would sail his boat back into harbor on Saturday nights just to watch the show?

A: Isn't that nice? Who knows, but that's the story and I don't think he would have done the show otherwise. He hardly needed to do a cameo appearance. Why would he bother to be on a sitcom unless he loved it?

Q: So, Mary was very hands on. Rarely retreated to her dressing room? Hated when people were late?

A: It was a very classy, no-nonsense operation. That's why they could handle Phyllis, for instance. Everyone was on point.

Q: There was a bit of jealousy between the guys and the girls, the guys thinking the girls got more attention. And that actually drew them all closer together?

A: They were all good people. They had such a good healthy relationship they dealt with it. They weren't mad at the girls. My theory was that the men were not used to not being the main character. The women got more media attention, so that could have fostered more tension. But they were a tight little unit.

Q: Still, Ted (Knight) got tired of being the butt of jokes.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong examines the classic sitcom in 'Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted.' Here, Ed Asner, Mary Tyler Moore and Ted Knight star in a scene from the CBS show. (Photo: CBS)

A: Yes. It makes me sad I couldn't talk to him. I think he would have been so interesting. It's this strange balance of hubris and total insecurity. He's full of himself because he's so insecure. But he was very sensitive to the fact people identified him with his character. He struggled a lot.

Q: You talk a lot about the writers. What was going on there? They were bold enough to "divorce" Lou and his wife.

A: How many crazy factors does it take for a show to become iconic? The time was right. You have to be at the point where America was ready for it but didn't know it yet. The writers sneaked into things backwards and made people love these characters and then had Lou get a divorce, for instance. They also had actors who had the talent to pull this off.

Q: Maude, Archie Bunker. They all pushed the envelope back then. Mary was a bit slower.

A: Yes, they just kind of crept up on issues. I got obsessed with the difference between the various shows. It's either let's yell about the issues of the day, be in your face, let's work this deal, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show where the issues come from the characters.

Q: And Oprah credits Mary with much of her success?

A: Yes. I love the idea that Oprah was obsessed with the show. She dressed like Mary. She wanted to know how to get a job like Mary's.

Q: The famous last scene when Mary turns out of the lights of the newsroom had to be shot over and over. Why?

A: The lighting guy forgot to do it (lower the lights), he was so wrapped up in the emotion of the moment. That's one of my favorite details. I love it.

Q: Why wouldn't this show work today?

A: Actually I think it might. I do think a lot of shows today do what it did. The question is, would it be as special now? It invented so many other things that we now take for granted. It wouldn't be as much a giant national experience as it was. It's not as brash as things today. But it's held up very, very well. I'm not sure I would have written the book if it hadn't. You can still identify with all the characters.

View the original article here

THROUGH THE PERILOUS FIGHT: Six Weeks That Saved the Nation

May 3, 2013

Steve Vogel
Random House
ISBN 978-1400069132
534 pages
$30

Reviewed by Joyce Appleby

Two hundred years ago this spring, an ambitious and bellicose rear admiral, George Cockburn, steered a small squadron of British naval vessels into the Chesapeake Bay. Through April and May, Cockburn became the most hated man in America as he enthusiastically plundered whatever he laid his eyes on, sending back boatloads of booty to British military headquarters in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "I have no hesitation," Cockburn wrote his commander, "in pronouncing that the whole of the shores and towns within this vast bay, not excepting the Capital itself will be wholly at your mercy ... or destroyed at your pleasure." And he was right.

The law of unintended consequences operates with unique force when a war is launched. We know that all too well. Two centuries ago, Americans discovered even more painfully how true it was.

At the time, Britain and France were engaged in a titanic struggle. Britain had a first-class navy, and Napoleon had put together the greatest fighting forces the world had seen. The new American nation was suffering from that war's collateral damage -- to its merchant fleet and its pride. Both the British and the French refused to recognize the country's neutrality, seizing any ships that might aid their enemy. More provocatively, the British navy, starved for manpower, pressed American seamen into coerced service.

First-term Southern and Western members of Congress began screaming for retribution. Mild-mannered President James Madison, driven to desperate measures, advised Congress to declare war on Great Britain. And it did so in June 1812.

Here is where the law of unintended consequences kicks in. Madison didn't want a fight; he wanted to stop the depredations on American commerce, so he devised a strategy of invading Canada in the hope that this would force Britain to the peace table. Instead the Canadian campaigns, headed by old Revolutionary War veterans, floundered. It took a year for Madison to find any talented leadership for his woefully unprepared army.

One of the assumptions Madison and others labored under was that Britain would be too preoccupied with beating Napoleon to pay much attention to its quondam colonies. But alas, the British defeated Napoleon and dispatched him to Elba in the spring of 1814. The hero of the hour, the Duke of Wellington, was ordered to ready an expeditionary force of "Wellington Invincibles" for quick dispatch across the Atlantic to teach the Americans a lesson and perhaps even break up the union, which was then only 37 years old.

In "Through the Perilous Fight," Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel does a superb job of bringing this woeful tale to life. He leavens his fast-paced narrative with lively vignettes of the principal participants in this folly, beginning with Cockburn and Francis Scott Key, the one person most Americans remember from this forgettable war as the author of those daunting soprano lines: "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air."

Key, a Federalist, was also a devout Episcopalian who recoiled from the American strategy of attacking Canadians who had nothing to do with them. Cockburn shared none of Key's peace-loving sentiments. Americans compared him to Attila the Hun, conveniently forgetting that their troops had left hundreds of people out in the cold after burning down an Ontario town in the dead of winter.

...continuedPage: 1 2 View full story Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Facebook Email Print

var aid = 335;var v ="faRYDBGmVx168yo3%2f3rZpQ%3d%3d";var credomain = "adkengage.com";document.write(''); blog comments powered by

View the original article here

MYSTERIES: Edgar finalists for best novel

May 3, 2013

NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA

Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp

Whowunit? We'll find out Thursday, when the Mystery Writers of America announce the 2013 Edgar Allan Poe Award winners at a gala banquet in New York. The awards, founded in 1946, honor the best mystery writing in fiction, nonfiction and television. One thing's for sure: The winning novel won't be a cozy. There are no sugar-laden recipes, needlework or twee doings in small villages among the seven best novel finalists, which range in hue from tar-sands black to abyss.

"All I Did Was Shoot My Man," by Walter Mosley (Riverhead). Leonid McGill, private investigator and former boxer, has tried hard to make up for his crooked ways. He just freed Zella Grisham, who served eight years for a $58 million heist she didn't commit. His efforts to help her would seem downright noble - if he hadn't set her up in the first place. But even though he's sure Zella is innocent, people connected to the robbery start turning up dead. Meanwhile, his wife is drinking too much, his oldest son just moved in with an ex-prostitute, his daughter is having an affair with a married man, and his youngest boy - who rivals McGill as a criminal genius, even though they aren't biologically related - is now working with his dad. Mosley, an O. Henry winner and PEN/America's Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, is in fine form in his fourth McGill mystery, a complicated tale of atonement and family.

"The Gods of Gotham," by Lyndsay Faye (Amy Einhorn). As the potato famine sends Irish immigrants fleeing to New York in 1845, former barman Timothy Wilde starts a second career as a "copper star," part of the city's first police force. (A fire wiped out his life's savings and left him disfigured, but his older brother, a politically connected morphine addict, got him the job.) One night, a girl covered in blood leads him to a mass grave of children. Faye employs flash (thieves' slang), crafty twists and superb period detail in her second historical thriller, which has won favorable comparisons to Caleb Carr's "The Alienist."

"Gone Girl," by Gillian Flynn (Crown). Wood might be traditional for a fifth-anniversary gift, but the Dunnes have gone with murder instead. This tale of a marriage gone very, very wrong was a runaway critical and commercial success in 2012. Selling more than 2 million copies and landing on multiple best-of-the-year lists, the tale of a hapless liar who may have killed his perfectionist wife was long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and is slated to be turned into a movie produced by Reese Witherspoon. Fans of unreliable narrators, rejoice: You can't believe anything either spouse tells you in Flynn's acid-inked pages.

"Live by Night," by Dennis Lehane (Morrow). A Boston cop's son winds up a gangster in Lehane's Prohibition-era novel, a follow-up to "The Given Day" (2008). Twenty-year-old Joe Coughlin commits two sins, either one of which could prove fatal: First, he robs gangster Albert White, then he steals his girlfriend. After a bank robbery goes south, Coughlin winds up in a Charleston prison, where another crime boss takes him under his wing. Oscar winner Ben Affleck, who adapted Lehane's "Gone, Baby, Gone," is set to direct and star in the movie version. Lehane, a multiple-award-winning writer, already has an Edgar on his shelf, shared for HBO's "The Wire."

"The Lost Ones," by Ace Atkins (Putnam). Former Army Ranger Quinn Colson, now sheriff of Tibbehah County, Miss., finds himself mixed up in cases involving trafficked babies, stolen army rifles, Mexican drug gangs and a not-terribly-bright high school buddy. Atkins - whose first Colson novel, "The Ranger," also was nominated for an Edgar - interspersesthe investigations with haunting episodes from the sheriff's childhood. Despite one dead child, the feds seem more concerned with finding the guns than the kids, leaving Colson and his deputy to locate the children before their "caregivers" decide it's easier to just cut their losses.

"Potboiler," by Jesse Kellerman (Putnam). The lightest of this year's finalists takes thriller writing and stands it on its head while making goofy faces. After a best-selling thriller writer is lost at sea, Art Pfefferkorn, a one-book has-been, steals a manuscript from his oldest friend's office and passes it off as its own. That sets off a darkly hilarious chain of events that gets Pfefferkorn - the unlikeliest secret agent since "Chuck" - embroiled in international schemes, high-stakes rescues and multiple double crosses. There's also epic poetry writing and plenty of root vegetables.

"Sunset," by Al Lamanda (Five Star). Former police officer John Bekker finds salvation from a most unlikely source: the mob boss he thought had had his wife raped and murdered in front of their 5-year-old daughter. A decade later, the girl has never spoken again, and Bekker is a drunken shell living in a trailer. The mobster, now dying of cancer after his own wife is murdered, forcibly detoxes Bekker and hires him to discover the truth.

Zipp reviews books for The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Facebook Email Print

var aid = 335;var v ="faRYDBGmVx168yo3%2f3rZpQ%3d%3d";var credomain = "adkengage.com";document.write(''); blog comments powered by

View the original article here

SAUL BELLOW'S HEART: A Son's Memoir

May 3, 2013

Greg Bellow
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1608199952
228 pages
$26

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Eight years ago, when Saul Bellow died, I wrote an obituary tribute about him for this newspaper in which I ranked him with some of his most notable contemporaries - among them Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor - and said that they were "big writers (even those who mainly wrote short stories) with big ambitions, men and women who weren't afraid to take chances, who looked out at the world instead of into the mirror." But this book by Bellow's son Gregory, the first of his four children (each by a different marriage), convinces me otherwise: not that Bellow's work wasn't "big," which it certainly was, but that it was always rooted in what can only be called extreme self-absorption, if not outright narcissism.

One of those to whom I compared him was Bernard Malamud. Greg Bellow tells us toward the end of this memoir of his father that he spoke with Janna Malamud Smith in the course of writing it, because he respects her own memoir of her father - "My Father Was a Book" (2006) - as well he should. Both are offspring of fathers who contributed a great deal to American literature but were, as writers tend to be, somewhat less successful as parents. "Saul Bellow's Heart" is the testimony of a son who loved his father but was in effect deserted by him over much of their shared lifetimes, who treasured his memories of their father-son relationship when both were young but in time came to resent - with ample reason, in my view - those "dozens of self-appointed sons and daughters" who attached themselves to the world-famous, post-Nobel Prize Bellow.

Gregory Bellow, now in his late 60s, took up the study of psychoanalysis and eventually made a good career for himself as a psychotherapist specializing in children's behavior and problems at the Sanville Institute for Clinical Social Work in California, from which he is now semi-retired. He readily acknowledges that his interest in the field grew out of his childhood, a complicated one indeed with his father's five marriages and total absorption in his writing. He has tried to be both honest about and fair to his father in "Saul Bellow's Heart" and has largely succeeded, but he also acknowledges that there are things in this book that his father would not like, chief among them perhaps that he subjects Saul Bellow to precisely the kind of close scrutiny to which Saul subjected the real men and women who became fictional characters in his work.

"Saul certainly wrote in the heat of anger after his second and third divorces," Gregory writes. "And, to the chagrin of many, his published work gave him the last word. ... But I remain convinced that his novels were not simply or primarily written to get even with those who hurt him because were that the case, Saul Bellow would never have become the great writer that he was." Still:

"That is not to say that Saul's firm line between life and art is not open to serious question. He crossed it freely in novel after novel while attacking anyone who asserted that he had done so. Such literary license can and often does bleed into blatant thievery. And stealing someone's personhood is not a victimless crime. To the contrary, it is a crime whose victims simply have no voice. It is not - as I recently heard Benjamin Taylor, editor of my father's recently published letters, assert - an honor to be immortalized in a great work of art."

Certainly it is no honor to be thus immortalized if the portrait drawn from one's role in the author's life is unfair or vindictive; poor Sasha and Susan, wives No. Two and Three, who took their lumps, and lucky Gregory, that he never found himself portrayed, or characterized, in any of his father's books. In fiction as in life, Bellow could be especially hard on women, whom he valued for sexual favors and the "deeply maternal forms of love" that his mother had given him but that he ultimately found lacking in all his wives except the last, Janis Freedman. He trusted and respected Harriet Wasserman, who was his agent for many years until he unceremoniously booted her for what he seemed to see as a better offer, and the lasting influence of his mother cannot be overestimated, but he "had little sympathy with feminist ideas, the increasing presence of women in academia, or prominent women writers." In part this reflected the bitterness that was engendered in him by the various social, cultural, sexual and political excesses of the 1960s and later, but it was also just plain good old-fashioned male chauvinist piggery.

Still, "Saul Bellow's Heart" is written with love mixed with vexation and frustration rather than with anger or resentment. His father was "a man who took such pains to protect what Saul called his 'inner life,'" who "surrounded his heart with a thicket that I was able to penetrate from time to time, though it remained difficult for both of us to fathom." Some of Saul's most important characters "suffer from an inability to give and take love freely"; Gregory believes "that to have been Saul's greatest personal flaw," and he senses that Saul both knew this and agreed. Certainly as he grew older and more famous, the thicket or carapace around his head grew ever more dense. His son believes that there actually were two Sauls, "young Saul" and "old Saul," and he has written this book primarily to acquaint us with young Saul.

Both young and old Saul were "always easily angered, prone to argument, acutely sensitive, and palpably vulnerable to criticism," but young Saul was also "emotionally accessible, often soft, and possessed of the ability to laugh at the world's folly and at himself. ... Saul's accessibility and lightheartedness waned as he aged. His social views hardened, although he was, fundamentally, no less vulnerable." Thus we have this memoir, which seeks to give "equal weight" to the well-known old Saul and the little-known young Saul, little-known not merely to the public but within the Bellow family and especially to Gregory's two younger brothers, Adam and Dan, who scarcely knew young Saul at all. The change can be traced in the novels:

"During the twelve-year span that began with the 1964 publication of 'Herzog' and ended with the awarding of the Nobel Prize, the idealistic 'young Saul' became the pessimistic 'old Saul.' I cannot fully explain the changes that were brewing in my father. 'Mr. Sammler's Planet' hints at how the political tumult of the late sixties affected Saul, and 'Humboldt's Gift' addresses the downsides of the fame and fortune that reached a crescendo in Stockholm. From my viewpoint it was during these pivotal years that the optimism and hope I loved and admired in 'young Saul' were buried under pessimism, anger, bitterness, intolerance, and preoccupations with evil and with his death, which lasted for the rest of his life."

Doubtless the reader has deduced from this that while Saul retreated from, even repudiated, his youthful leftist opinions, Gregory remains faithful to them. Though he does not use the word "betrayed," this is plainly how he feels with regard to his father's later political views. Yet it is odd that a practitioner of the craft of psychotherapy should be so intolerant of his own father's midlife change of course. Gregory Bellow seems unable fully to separate the personal and the political, and thus lays a heavier burden of guilt on his father than is really deserved. He can fault him for many things - long periods of neglect, utter faithlessness to all his wives except perhaps the last, self-absorption so intense as to render even those closest to him irrelevant - but supporting the Vietnam War and falling for neoconservatism really shouldn't matter so much as they clearly do to Gregory Bellow. As a result there are too many times when "Saul Bellow's Heart" seems not so much the love song it was intended to be as a complaint of ideological faithlessness.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

Facebook Email Print

var aid = 335;var v ="faRYDBGmVx168yo3%2f3rZpQ%3d%3d";var credomain = "adkengage.com";document.write(''); blog comments powered by

View the original article here