Word: manuscript
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Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and a leader of Manhattan's literary brat pack, has a novel due out next February that is already causing controversy. Staff members at Simon & Schuster who have read the manuscript, titled American Psycho, say it chronicles a young Wall Street banker who is involved in sexual perversities, murders, mutilations and diverse other grotesqueries and degradations. Robert Asahina, Ellis' editor, allows, "It is a book that can be at times upsetting to read." Some are so upset that they have balked at working on the novel. But Ellis has his defenders...
...fact that this book has been published at all is a testament to Sakharov's irrepresible spirit. On four separate occasions KGB agents stole his notes, diaries, and drafts of the book. In one of these thefts he lost nine hundred pages of manuscript. At first he did not plan to publish Memoirs, but the setbacks, rather than demoralizing him, convinced him that they must be published...
...time only to grab my ancient cat, Minnie, and the manuscript of a book just two weeks from completion. By the time I tried to jump into my car to drive away, walls of flame were jumping over the driveway, scorching my face and shrouding the house in an angry orange haze. The three of us leaped, pursued by flames, into a van, and started to race down the mountain road. Within 50 yards, we knew we could go no farther. Flames 70 feet high were cresting over the curve of the hill on one side, and on the other...
...hushed. Later, officials announced that the fire was probably caused by arson. On Saturday, Santa Barbara was declared a federal disaster area. Fifteen years of daily notes and books half written, of statues and photos and memories, were gone. My only solace came from the final irony. In the manuscript I had saved, I had quoted the poem of the 17th century Japanese wanderer Basho, describing how destruction can sometimes bring a kind of clarity...
Aside from the physical problem of getting the memoirs out of the country, there was a moral consideration. It was no longer 1958, but it wasn't yet 1988 either. Only ten years before, Boris Pasternak had drawn thunder and lightning down upon himself by giving his manuscript to an Italian publisher...