Literary Figures: Novelists

Richard Ford, author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, has written a new novel entitled The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Writer Ian Buruma's new book is about the 2004 death of a popular media personality at the hands of a Muslim radical. In writing Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Buruma found long-standing tensions between native-born Dutch and Muslim immigrants.

How can a nice girl fall for a trench-coated tough guy who treats women like dirt and ridicules book-reading sissies? Our book critic tries to fathom the appeal of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.

Crime writer Mickey Spillane died Monday at age 88. Spillane was most famous for his sex- and violence-drenched Mike Hammer detective novels. His titles include Kiss Me Deadly and I the Jury. While critics rarely praised Spillane, his books were bestsellers. This interview originally aired on Nov. 22, 1989.

Edmund White has been writing about gay culture in fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s. He has a new autobiography, My Lives. White is director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Ann Fessler talks about her new book, The Girls Who Went Away. Using her own story of adoption as a basis for her book, Fessler tells the story of over a million women who surrendered children for adoption prior to legalized abortion. Fessler is a photography professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Philip Roth's new novel is about a 71-year-old multi-divorced, successful advertising man who is facing his physical deterioration and approaching death — without the aid of religion or philosophy. One reviewer called Everyman a "swift, brutal novel about a heartbreakingly ordinary subject."

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