Thursday, June 26, 2008

Four Exciting Author Interviews: Find Your July Summer Reading Books

Stan Lauryssens

Dali & I: The Surreal Story

The guardians of Salvador Dalí’s estate are threatening legal action over a new book by a Belgian former art dealer and self-confessed fraudster, which is being turned into a film starring Al Pacino.

Released in Spain today, the book about the flamboyant Spanish artist is laced with sensational accusations — even for a man who deliberately courted controversy during his lifetime.

In Dali & I: The Surreal Storythe author Stan Lauryssens alleges that Dalí authorized thousands of forgeries of his own work in his later years to fund his increasingly lavish lifestyle. Up to half of all Dalís are outright fakes, Mr Lauryssens suggests.

He also spices up his story with tales of Dalí's supposed orgies with actresses, sexual exploits with young boys and accuses his wife, Gala, of stealing from Kirk Douglas’s wallet during a 1969 visit. Read the rest of the interview here....

Bart Jones

Hugo! The Hugo Chaves Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution

Bart Jones is the author of Hugo! The Hugo Chaves Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution(Steerforth, New Hampshire 2007). Jones lived in Venezuela from 1992 to 2000, working initially as a Maryknoll lay missioner and then as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press. He now lives in Long Island, New York with his wife and two children. The book has also just been released in the UK and will soon be published in Brazil in Portuguese.

You were an AP correspondent for six years. What's your take on Venezuela coverage in the U.S. media?

I think the media has done a less than stellar job. They've done a terrific job describing the opposition to Chavez, but less well explaining why he also has significant support and has won so many elections, which by the way are generally free and fair. They've also helped manage to create a simplistic cartoon caricature of Chavez as an evil monster and brutal dictator – for many one of the most hated people on the planet today, as if he was some kind of Hitler. Yet in his own country he is adored by millions of poor people. There is a real dichotomy between how Chavez is viewed overseas and how he is viewed by the majority in his own country. This internationalization demonization is partly the doing of the media.

The media has also demonstrated something of a double standard when it comes to Chavez. For instance, in neighboring Colombia there is clear evidence of ties between the government of President Alvaro Uribe and right-wing paramilitary death squads. Uribe's foreign minister, his campaign manager, a cousin who is a close political ally, and dozens of congressional allies have resigned or been arrested for alleged ties to these paramilitary death squads. Uribe himself was a friend of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, according to declassified U.S. documents. Yet none of this is an issue in the U.S. for the general public, even though Uribe is a major U.S. ally who is getting billions in U.S. aid. Imagine if Chavez was in bed with paramilitary death squads. It would be a huge story drilled into the public's mind. Read the rest of the interview here....

Daren King

Boxy a Star

At the beginning of our interview, on a sunny day in Brighton, Daren King is relieved by the relatively straightforward demands of our photographer. Others have had perverse requirements in the past: that he perch in an oversized armchair, for example, or jump around on a bed. "It's the 'childlike' thing," he says, with great patience.

To be fair, it is difficult to sum up King's dazzlingly weird, filthy-naive writing style in photographic form – or even in words. His first novel, Boxy a Star,was published in 1999 to gasps of astonishment. Critics described it as "exceptional", "maverick", "scorchingly poetic", "my very favorite work of fiction this year" and "like some delirious encounter between PG Wodehouse and William S Burroughs". Those very few who didn't love it hated it.

Boxy a Starwas set in a foggy near future and told the story of Bole, a loved-up young pill-head, and his girlfriend Star. It began: "Me an Star are under the pill bag. The pill bag is a jumbo big bag an is massive an full up of pills. It feels nice on us. On me an my girl she is called Star an we are in love." The language was hypnotic and dreamy and could get stuck in your head – or rather your head could get stuck in it. King hooked up with a fashionable group of young writers, the New Puritans (two of them, Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, turn up in his second novel as the camp pimp Mr Bingo and his minder, Ape Hands), contributed to an anthology of smut edited by Zadie Smith and was seen at literary parties accompanied by a small, stuffed giraffe. It looked as though a brilliant, eccentric new star had been born.

Elizabeth George

Careless in Red

YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD of Elizabeth George; nor had I, but like so many writers who steam along below the literary radar, she turns out to be a bestselling author with a worldwide following - the Germans particularly adore her. Her books have made her a wealthy woman and she has just built an ocean-front dream house on the proceeds.

George is an Anglophile crime writer from California; Thomas Lynley, her detective hero, is an English aristocrat with posh friends and a titled wife whom the author killed off in the 13th book to cries of anguish and outrage from her readers. Her stories are all set in regionally distinctive bits of Britain such as Yorkshire or Cornwall and drenched in vernacular verisimilitude (apologies for this last phrase but I have been reading George non-stop for the past three days and have started writing like her). She works hard on research, she tells me, tramping streets with her tape recorder and camera, chatting up the locals, and doesn't like to waste any of it, though she does make the occasional howler, as the Times crime critic Marcel Berlins has pointed out several times.

He is a fan of her ingenious plotting but says: “She is an exasperating writer, insists on perpetuating a police procedure that hasn't existed for decades, is not good on social mores and her dialogue often reveals a tin ear.” George was apparently furious about this at the time but when I quote Berlins to her over tea in a London hotel, she asks with impressive innocence: “Who is he?” Read the rest of the interview here....

Here are Five Other Author Interviews for Summer Reading.