Carlos Fuentes, 83, has died

Renowned Spanish-language novelist Carlos Fuentes died Tuesday in Mexico City at age 83, authorities announced. Fuentes was a prolific, politically engaged writer, best known in the U.S. for books including “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” “Aura,” “Terra Nostra,” “The Good Conscience” and “The Old Gringo,” which was made into a film starring Gregory Peck. In an interview published Monday in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Fuentes said he had just completed a new novel, titled "Federico on His Balcony."

In that interview, Fuentes said, "My system of youth is to work a lot," and that he had a project pending. In 2006, after the death of his 29-year-old daughter, Fuentes told The Times, "It was very painful.... It puts a premium on your own soul. How do you go on living? How do you make people go on living within you? It nullifies you or sends you into work. Work saves you."

Born in Panama City in 1928 to Mexican parents, Fuentes lived in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, France, Mexico, England and the U.S., where he had taught at Brown, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia. He was often spoken of in conjunction with other writers of his generation from Latin America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both of whom have won the Nobel Prize; although Fuentes received many prestigious awards, the Nobel eluded him.

"At home, Fuentes remained until the end outspoken on issues of the day," our World Now blog reports. "His most recent column — about the presidential election in France — was published Tuesday in the daily Reforma newspaper. Disdainful of many Mexican politicians, he tacked a note at the end taking aim at the tone of Mexico’s own presidential race, which he said sacrificed discussion of big issues for candidates’ petty attempts to knock each other down."

Between 1992 and 2011, Fuentes was interviewed five times by KCRW's Michael Silverblatt. The first four interviews were directly related to books. In the most recent interview, posted in two parts, the two discuss culture, politics and writing. All the interviews can be streamed online.

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Photo: Carlos Fuentes in 2008. Credit: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Stay e-gold, Ponyboy: 'The Outsiders' becomes an e-book

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of S.E. Hinton's book "The Outsiders." To celebrate, Penguin is releasing the story of the boys from the wrong side of the tracks for the first time as an e-book.

Hinton began writing the book while she was still a high school student in Tulsa, Okla."It was the year I was 16 and a junior in high school that I did the majority of the work (that was the year I made a D in creative writing)," she said in an interview on a website dedicated to "The Outsiders" book and film. "One day, a friend of mine was walking home from school and these 'nice' kids jumped out of a car and beat him up because they didn't like him being a greaser. This made me mad and I just went home and started pounding out a story about this boy who was beaten up while he was walking home from the movies — the beginning of 'The Outsiders.'" The novel was published by Viking when she was a freshman at the University of Tulsa, in 1967. She later published "That Was Then, This is Now," "Rumblefish" and "Tex," among other novels.

The book "The Outsiders" was adapted for the screen in 1983. Director Francis Ford Coppola cast a stellar group of mostly up-and-coming young actors that included Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. Ralph Macchio played the ill-fated Jonny and C. Thomas Howell his friend, the narrator Ponyboy.

In its press release about the e-book edition of "The Outsiders," Penguin notes that there are more than 14 million copies of the book in print, making it the bestselling young-adult novel of all time. Its e-book edition is available for $9.99.

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— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo:  From the 1983 film "The Outsiders"; from left, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise. Credit: Associated Press

Mike McGrady, the man behind sexy, '60s literary hoax, has died

Mike McGrady, a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking reporter who rallied his Newsday colleagues to write 1969's suburban sexcapade "Naked Came the Stranger" under a pseudonym, has died. He was 78.

Published as the supposedly true-life tales of a highly sexed suburban housewife, the book was attributed to Penelope Ashe, who turned out to be a wholly invented character. Like J.T. Leroy after her, Ashe was represented publicly by an actual human -- Billie Young, McGrady's sister-in-law -- who had nothing to do with the text.

That book had been written by McGrady and others on the Newsday editorial team. Inspired by popular bestsellers by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, McGrady challenged his newsroom buddies to write their own terrible, trashy, sex-filled bestseller. McGrady and 24 other writers each took a chapter; in every badly-written one, Penelope Ashe engaged in fantastical sexual exploits.

"It was great," McGrady said in an August 1969 Times story, after the scheme had been exposed. "Everybody sat down and wrote his chapter in one night. It was terrific for morale at the paper. We would all pass our chapters around to see how bad everybody else was writing. The only problem was that we had to send several back for rewriting. They were too good."

That was in 1966. McGrady and co-editor Harvey Aronson spent some time knitting the pieces together and finding a publisher. Lyle Stuart, known for its racy books, published "Naked Came the Stranger" in 1969 without being aware of its true origins. 

The actual authors were exposed in the summer of that year, with McGrady happily telling the story of the book. He talked to newspapers and appeared on the television show "To Tell The Truth."

Not everyone was delighted by the ruse. "Mike McGrady and cohorts' bestselling novel 'Naked Came the Stranger' is not only evidence of a decadent American society, but a perverted one as well," fumed Times reader Dona Gregory in a 1969 letter to the paper. "The fact that 25 journalists baited fellow Americans with all the sickness their little minds could conjure up was matched, (perhaps surpassed) only by those who bought 20,000 copies, the $127,000 Dell paid for paperback rights and the 20 movie companies now considering it for film possibilities."

McGrady hoped that a film version would be as deliberately bad as the book itself. "Would anyone in Tinseltown have the guts to make a consciously bad movie?" he asked in The Times in 1970. "The movie, as I see it, should be a compilation of all the great Hollywood cliches. I envision an endless series of naked backsides, flames flickering in nearby fireplaces, fireworks being set off against night skies ... "

Negotiations over a film version never panned out; a pornographic film of the same title was released, but it was not made in conjunction with the book's authors.

In 1970 McGrady published a how-to book for aspiring writers, "Stranger Than Naked: Or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit."

Maybe that's the secret to E.L. James and her wildly popular series, "50 Shades of Grey."

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Image: The Dell paperback edition of "Naked Came the Stranger." Credit: Goodreads

What we're reading: book news, copyrights and ephemera

A 350-page ruling was delivered late Friday in the Cambridge University Press et. al. v. Patton case, known colloquially as the Georgia State University e-reserves copyright case. The ruling, which scholars and universities had been waiting a year for, is mixed, leaving both parties -- libraries advocating for fair use on one side and publishers on the other -- with reason to be pleased. Or to be displeased. Observers suggests an appeal is likely. (Scholarly Communications at Duke University, Publishers Weekly)

The New York Public Library announced its 2012-13 Cullman Center fellows in April, and every single project sounds fascinating. Ruth Franklin is working on a biography of writer Shirley Jackson; artist Gary Panter is exploring images of paradise and the afterlife as imagined by Milton and Dante; Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is writing a collection of stories set in 1863, when there were draft riots in New York City; Luc Sante is working on a documentary novel about the end of bohemia (think 1982); John Wray is writing a novel about a century in the life of a family of renegade physicists. There's more, but not quite enough.That's because I wish the L.A. Public Library might have a similar program, and offer writing space and stipends to gifted authors. There certainly is demand -- 305 writers applied for the 15 Cullman Fellowships. (NY Public Library)

Want to buy a club chair or two for your home library? The outdoor antique show in Brimfield, Mass., has you covered. (A Continuous Lean)

L.A. moviegoers still love Raymond Chandler: "The Big Sleep" is the first sellout of the Last Remaining Seats series from the L.A. Conservancy. The summer series is held at downtown's grand, endangered theaters -- thanks in part to the series (and in part to being used as film locations) some are making a comeback. The Bansky film "Exit Through the Gift Shop" premiered at the Los Angeles Theatre, completed in 1931, which is where "Paper Moon" will screen this year. One other literary film will be screening as part of the series -- "The Wizard of Oz," based on L. Frank Baum's books, will show both as a matinee and in the evening at the recently restored art deco Saban Theater in Beverly Hills. (L.A. Conservancy's Last Remaining Seats)

Silly cover alert: "Dog on the Roof! On the Road with Mitt & The Mutt" by Bill Kluger & David Slavin, illustrated by Colleen Clapp, is coming June 19. Written in rhyme, the children's-style book is a short political satire for adults. (From our book room)

Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century Englishman whose lively diaries are now posted online, daily, in blog form, had a very good day on May 14, 1669. For the first time, he was invited to dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury:

[T]he first time I was ever there and I have long longed for it; where a noble house, and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and noble attendance in good order, and great deal of company, though an ordinary day; and exceeding great cheer, no where better, or so much, that ever I think I saw, for an ordinary table: and the Bishop mighty kind to me, particularly desiring my company another time, when less company there. Most of the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be there; and so I staid to hear it, thinking it serious, till by and by the gentleman told me it was a mockery, by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentleman-like man, that behind a chair did pray and preach like a Presbyter Scot that ever I heard in my life, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon the willows: and a serious good sermon too, exclaiming against Bishops, and crying up of my good Lord Englinton, a till it made us all burst; but I did wonder to have the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with things of this kind, but I perceive it was shewn him as a rarity; and he took care to have the room-door shut, but there were about twenty gentlemen there, and myself, infinitely pleased with the novelty.

May we all have days as pleasant. (Pepys Diary)

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in "The Big Sleep," adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel. Credit: UCLA Film and Television Archive

 

Authors in town this week: Benjamin Busch, Erik Larson and Pico Iyer

Benjamin Busch has an interesting resume. He’s an actor -- he played Anthony Colicchio on the HBO series “The Wire,” appearing in the final three seasons of the show -- and also a photographer, former Marine Corps officer and writer.

The son of novelist Frederick Busch, he was raised in upstate New York and went to Vassar College. An item in the New Yorker recently noted that his parents had protested the Vietnam War and Benjamin confounded them by joining the Marines after graduating. He served two tours of duty in Iraq with the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion and, while there, took photographs of his combat experience. He has shown those photographs in three exhibitions. In his memoir, “Dust to Dust,” he considers his life so far -- he's in town this week at Vroman’s and Skylight Books.

Also this week: Pico Iyer, one of our favorite writers and thinkers, is in conversation with Lisa Napoli in a Live Talks Los Angeles program at the Fowler Musuem  at UCLA on Thursday. Erik Larson, author of  “Devil in the White City” and, most recently, “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin” in conversation with David Kipen at Writer’s Bloc on Tuesday. And, if dogs are your thing, W. Bruce Cameron discusses his latest foray into the canine world also on Tuesday at Book Soup.

There are plenty of great, no-cost, low-cost, higher-cost events available, so get out and enjoy. As always, we suggest you check the appropriate venue to confirm information and notice on late cancellations.  

Monday, May 14, 7 p.m. Benjamin Busch reads and signs “Dust to Dust: a Memoir.” Vroman’s

Monday, May 14, 7 p.m. David Talbot discusses and signs “Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.” Book Soup

Tuesday, May 15, 7:30 p.m. Benjamin Busch reads and signs “Dust to Dust: a Memoir” Skylight Books

Tuesday, May 15, 7:30 p.m. Erik Larson, author of “Devil in the White City” and “In the Garden of Beasts” in conversation with David Kipen in a Writer’s Bloc event at Temple Emanuel, 300 N. Clark Drive, Beverly Hills. Tickets: $20

Tuesday, May 15, 7 p.m. Christelyn D. Karazin and Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn discuss “Swirling: How to Date, Mate, and Relate Mixing Race, Culture and Creed" Eso Won Bookstore

Tuesday, May 15, 7 p.m. W. Bruce Cameron discusses and signs “A Dog’s Journey” Book Soup

Tuesday, May 15, 8 p.m. Gregg Allman talks about his memoir “My Cross to Bear” with Alan Light as part of Live Talks Los Angeles program at Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. Tickets: $25

Thousands follow Russian writers in protest walk

Thousands took to the streets of Moscow on Sunday to follow a handful of writers taking a "stroll" as a literal protest against efforts to thwart public gatherings. The poet Dmitry Bykov, detective novelist Boris Akunin, children's book writer Eduard Uspensky, bestselling author Lyudmila Ulitskaya and eight others had come up with the idea just four days before.

The N.Y. Times reports:

No one knew quite what to expect on Sunday. But when the 12 writers left Pushkin Square at lunchtime, they were trailed by a crowd that swelled to an estimated 10,000 people, stopping traffic and filling boulevards for 1.2 miles. Many wore the white ribbons that are a symbol of opposition to Mr. Putin’s government. The police did not interfere, although the organizers had not received a permit to march.

“We see by the number of people that literature still has authority in our society because no one called these people — they came themselves,” said Lev Rubinstein, 65, a poet and one of the organizers. “We thought this would be a modest stroll of several literary colleagues, and this is what happened. You can see it yourself.”

“I don’t know how this will all end, but I can say that no one will forget it,” he said.

Recent protests in opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin, who was inaugurated again Monday, have been subject to increasing crackdowns from authorities. Hundreds have been arrested, some for doing nothing more than wearing a white ribbon, a signal of opposition to Putin's government.

The authors said they wanted to walk across Moscow “without being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions.” A pending measure in Parliament would impose fines of about $50,000 and 740 hours of compulsory labor on public protesters.

Sunday's walk began at a statue of writer Aleksandr Pushkin and ended across town at a statue of playwright Aleksandr Griboyedov. According to organizers, 10,000 joined in the stroll; police set the number of participants at 2,000.

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Photo: Supporters of the writers' walk in Moscow. Credit: Sergey Ponomarev / Associated Press

LéaLA celebrates Spanish-language books this weekend

Here’s a trick question (at least for non-Spanish speakers): What’s North America’s most book-loving city? New York? Los Angeles? Toronto?

A good case could be made for awarding the bibliophiles’ prize to Guadalajara, a metropolis that many U.S. tourists associate only with mariachis and tequila.

The beautiful baroque-colonial city, Mexico’s second-largest, annually hosts what is reputed to be the largest book fair in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. Formally known as La Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, or FIL, the yearly convocation draws tens of thousands of visitors as well as hundreds of the world’s preeminent Spanish-language authors, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires.

This weekend, Angelenos will be flocking to the 2nd annual edition of  LéaLA, Feria del Libro en Español de Los Ángeles, a kind of scaled-down version of Guadalajara’s massive book festival, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Backed by the University of Guadalajara, and free and open to public, LéaLA aims to promote Spanish-language and Spanish-translated literature through book publishers’ sales-displays and readings and talks by distinguished authors.

Simultaneously, the festival is intended to bolster a growing cultural connection between Southern California’s enormous Mexican American/Latino population and Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco, the ancestral home of more L.A. Latinos than any other Mexican state.

Finally, LéaLA attempts to help make amends for a bizarre L.A. cultural phenomenon: the city’s near-absence of Spanish-language bookstores. Apart from public libraries, university bookstores (which stock course-related titles) and a handful of small shops like Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Sylmar and the Libros Schmibros bookstore/lending library in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles -- with the United States’ largest Spanish-speaking population -- has virtually no place to find and buy Spanish-language books.

In only its second year, LéaLA already has become one of the largest Spanish-language book-related events in the United States. Last year it drew 36,000 people to its inaugural edition. This year, with 200 individual exhibition stalls, up from 84 last year, and four times as much total floor space, festival organizers expect an even larger turnout.

Among the boldface names at this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, are the best-selling Mexican-Spanish writer and novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II, crime writer James Ellroy, the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and Mexican political analyst and intellectual Enrique Krauze.

At Guernica, Rebecca Solnit on 'The Hunger Games'

I thought I didn't need to read another word on "The Hunger Games." It's a bestselling book for young adults, a blockbuster movie starring an Oscar nominee who wields a bow and arrow, and it's generated almost as much Internet chatter as HBO's "Girls." But then comes Rebecca Solnit and, well, I'm curious.

One of our most interesting contemporary thinkers, Solnit has lately been looking into and beyond the surface of the news to try to understand how people exist together in the world, examining the elements of social cohesion and decay. Her recent books include "Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas," "Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics," and "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster."

In Guernica, she writes, "science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment." That trilogy is, as you can see, "The Hunger Games." She begins with the books themselves:

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like—and yet not exactly like—high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young....

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen—Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one—who refuses to be disposed of....

Then she turns to point out that the travails faced by Katniss have echoes -- much larger echoes -- in the real world. Like in "The Hunger Games," children from poor families are more likely to serve in the U.S. military, and Solnit points out that thousands of lives have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. She looks at real hunger, at how the burden of student debt is blocking education as a means of social advancement, at climate change and at quiet revolutions worldwide.

Along the way, she also mentions a few books: Bill McKibben's "Eaarth"; Jonathan Schell's "The Unconquerable World"; "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict" by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan; and "News from Nowhere" by William Morris.

"Resistance is one of your obligations," Solnit writes, "but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope." Read her complete take on "The Hunger Games" at Guernica.

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Photo: Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss in "The Hunger Games." Credit: Murray Close / Lionsgate

On Sunday: John Irving, Elizabeth Gilbert's great-grandma in kitchen

John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person,” appears at an interesting time. On Tuesday, North Carolina voted to ban same-sex marriages and civil unions. On Wednesday, President Obama stated that he was in favor of same-sex marriage. The timing of Irving's release is as remarkable as the subject matter of his novel. “In One Person"  concerns the life of Billy, the bisexual narrator who tells the story of his life as a “sexual suspect.” Our critic David Ulin notes that it takes a lot of "guts" for "a mainstream novelist to embrace sexual politics in this culture.” His review leads our coverage in Sunday Arts & Books.

Carolyn Kellogg reviews Madeleine Albright’s “Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948,”  the former Secretary of State's memoir of growing up in Prague and learning, years later, that her family was Jewish and that many of her ancestors had perished in the Holocaust. Kellogg writes that “the stories of their fates form the emotional core of the book, but the threads are slim.” Albright tells the story of World War II from the Czech point of view, certainly a different tact from the standard U.S. or English-centric vision of the conflict.

Lynell George has roots in New Orleans, so reading her pieces on the Crescent City are always a pleasure. Her essay this week is on the Historic New Orleans Collection, an organization committed to preserving the region’s vibrant culture. To that end, it's  publishing “The Louisiana Artists Biography Series,” dedicated to telling the life stories of some of the great artists of the region. Its latest book, written by Ben Sandmel, is “Ernie K Doe: The R & B Emperor of New Orleans.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” was a runaway bestseller in 2006. Now, she reaches into her family’s history for “At Home on the Range,” a cookbook by her great-grandmother Margaret Yardley Potter that Gilbert has helped get back into print. Gilbert offers an introduction to the work, which had a single printing in 1947. Potter was a food columnist for a newspaper in Wilmington, Del., and Noelle Carter writes that this book is both “delightfully humorous and remarkably insightful.” 

More after the jump

Mother's Day: What are new moms reading?

With Mother's Day coming up this Sunday, Jacket Copy wanted to find out what new moms and moms-to-be are reading. Maybe because every mother we asked is a writer herself, the reading list is wide, varied and very interesting: Turns out it's not just Dr. Spock and "What to Expect When You're Expecting."

Janelle Brown, author of the novels "This Is Where We Live" and  "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" and the mother of Theo, age 5 days, and Auden, age 2 years: "I'm reading 'Mirror, Mirror' by Gregory Maguire. A friend gave it to me when I asked her for hospital-friendly reading material for the sleep deprived. Haven't had a whole lot of opportunities to read, though. It's a dark and twisted adult version of the Snow White fairy tale, from the author of 'Wicked.'"

Dana Goodyear, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the poetry collection "Honey and Junk," is expecting her second child soon: "I'm reading 'Beyond the Beautiful Forevers' by Katherine Boo and, in the middle of the night, the Huffington Post on my phone.

Journalist Claire Zulkey, expecting her first child Sept. 4: "Right now I am reading Susan Orlean's "Rin Tin Tin" book and also listening to Michael Ian Black's book 'You're Not Doing It Right' (which is actually semi-about parenting)."

Edan Lepucki, author of the novella "If You're Not Yet Like Me" and mother of Dixon Bean Brown, 10 months old: "I'm reading a lot these days. I'm currently re-reading 'Stone Arabia' by Dana Spiotta, one of my favorite books of last year. I'm doing a lecture on it next Friday for a private arts and reading group in Pasadena called Inside the Story, so the reading is partly for work...but mostly for pleasure since it's such a lovely and beguiling read. I just finished the bestselling thriller 'Before I Go to Sleep' by S.J. Watson; I chose to read this because we were headed to Palm Springs for a family vacation and I wanted something deliciously readable to suck down along with my pool-side margarita. I wasn't taken with the style or the first-person narration but lord I could not put that sucker down!  Next on my shelf: Jonathan Lethem's 33 1/3 book on the Talking Heads album 'Fear of Music.'"

Grace Krilanovich, selected as one the National Book Award's 5 under 35 authors for her novel "The Orange Eats Creeps" is the mother of Ondine, 5 months: "I just got the new Brian Evenson novel, "Immobility," so I'm  looking forward to starting that in a day or so, after I finish reading the manuscript of Tom Hansen's new novel, 'This Is What We Do,' which will be out in August/September."

Claire Bidwell Smith, author of the memoir "The Rules of Inheritance," whose child is due June 12: "I just finished 'The Fault in Our Stars' by John Green, which I found to be kind of perfect. I'm now going back and forth between 'Bringing Up Bebe,' which I think illuminates the many flaws in the American parenting model in a really important way, and Diane Keaton's memoir 'Then Again,' which is such an incredible book about mother-daughter relationships."

If you're thinking of getting your mom a book, keep these mothers' reading lists in mind.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Reading, with baby. Credit: Lynn Friedman via Flickr