Word: novelists
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...first half-hour, all the guys we like walk right by, piling into the back of the bar for a reading by debut novelist Stephen Lovely. I wonder if maybe we should have gone to a sports bar, but Rudd seems to know what he's after. "If we went to ESPN Zone - that's not our kind of guy," he says. "We want someone nerdy. Bookish. Probably wears Chuck Taylors. Can make jokes about the fact that he's listening to the new Fleet Foxes CD. Maybe a little fey. I love straight guys that seem...
...villains of Lisey's Story, Stephen King's 2006 book about a famous novelist's widow, are dubbed Incunks - crazed academics and collectors who want nothing more than to obtain a dead writer's every last piece of prose and memorabilia - their incunabula. A more learned version of Misery's Annie Wilkes ("I'm your number one fan"), the Incunks speak in part to a writer's fear of having their unfinished, unpolished work stripped from their cold, dead hands (metaphorically, of course) and thrust out into the world...
Bleak. That's always been the rap against American novelist Richard Yates. Though he has been celebrated as a writer's writer and a consummate craftsman since his death in 1992, even his admirers found his work depressing. Fellow novelist Carolyn See explained it in 1981: "He's not going to get the recognition he truly deserves because to read Yates is as painful as getting all your teeth filed down to the gum with no anesthetic." Joyce Carol Oates agreed, writing in the Nation, "A sad, gray, deathly world - dreams without substance - aging without maturity; this is Yates' world...
...four-pack-a-day smoker with emphysema, he devoted himself to his craft. "Yates' work was infinitely more important to him than anything in his life," says his biographer, Blake Bailey, whose 2004 book, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, opened a window on the novelist's anguish. "He lived in these squalid apartments, with cockroaches squashed all around his desk chair and curtains grey with nicotine and what not. And people would think, oh, my God - how can he live like that? But the fact was, for Yates, if the work was going well, then...
Read a Q&A with vampire novelist Laurell K. Hamilton...