Novelist

NEW ORLEANS -- I'm trying to finish my novel about the end of the world and I'm having as much trouble as God must have had finishing the world in the first place.The beginning was easy: all uncharted territory, full steam ahead, imagination at play. The middle wasn't so easy because the beginning stood there, demanding some continuity if not responsibility from what came after.The difficulties increased exponentially the farther I wrote. As I grew closer to the end, the complexity of relations between my own inventions became so great I feared that I would be devoured by my own characters.

Taiye Selasi's debut novel has been in publication for less than a week. But even before a single copy was sold, the glamorous 33-year-old was being hailed as the newest star of the literary world. Selasi's publisher, The Penguin Group, is promoting "Ghana Must Go" big-time. Penguin describes the family saga as "one of the most eagerly anticipated debut novels of the year. " Because of her book's multicultural tapestry, Selasi has been compared to such literary It Girls as Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri.

From Monday to Thursday, he uses a 43-year-old Parker 51 fountain pen purchased in England to write fiction. Fridays are reserved for a Montblanc fountain pen, a gift from a Spanish friend, to write nonfiction essays. "I always write my first drafts in ink. The flow of ink on paper still pleases me, and as my friend, novelist Anne Tyler, says, it's `muscular cursive,'" said John Barth, a veteran Maryland writer whose first novel, The Floating Opera, was published in 1957. Barth, 76, taught English and creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University for 22 years before he and his wife, Shelly, who was on the faculty of St. Timothy's School for years, retired in 1995.

When Irish novelist Colum McCann reads from his work as part of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society's 35th Irish Evening on Friday, March 1 at 7:30 p.m. in Howard Community College's Smith Theatre, the audience has a right to be in a green mood. By way of colorful thoughts engendered by this festive evening of Irish literature, music and dance, they also might want to think about red, white and blue. McCann's writing has a lot to say about the United States, where he has set some of his novels and now lives.

With her 20th novel, "The Beginner's Goodbye," about to be released, Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler is already hard at work on her 21st — a "sprawling family saga that goes on and on and on" that she'll be writing backward, beginning with the ending. That way, Tyler explained in an interview broadcast on NPR on Friday morning, should she die before the book is finished, it could still be published. "Backwards, nobody would ever know whether you had reached the end you had planned," she told NPR's Lynn Neary.

The Baltimore Film Forum continues its premiere series this weekend with two more films drawn from short stories by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.These films, which Marquez himself adapted for Spanish television in the mid-'80s, are surprisingly fanciful and erotic.Tonight's performance at the Baltimore Museum of Art is "A Very Old Man with Enormous Arms." Tomorrow's will be "Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon Fancier."The screenings begin at 8 p.m. Admission is $4 for Film Forum and Museum members, students and seniors, and $5 for all others.

Madison Smartt Bell, a novelist and an English professor at Goucher College, has received a $250,000 literary award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the association announced yesterday. The 2008 Strauss Living Award -- which is distributed in $50,000 installments over five years -- was also awarded to California novelist and journalist William T. Vollmann. The prize comes with strings attached: Recipients must agree to forgo "positions of paid employment" during the award's five-year term.

SIGNPOSTSIN A STRANGE LAND.Walker Percy;edited by Patrick Samway.Farrar, Straus & Giroux.428 pages. $25. For me, this book could not have arrived at a more fortuitous time. We are deep into the summer book season, a time of easy reading -- gossipy biographies, thrillers and mysteries galore, yet more self-help books and tomes about finding the "inner you." Does the hot weather cause us to cease thinking during those days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, or is it just that vacation time tends to put everything remotely serious on hold?

Augusta Walker, a novelist, playwright and yoga devotee, died Thursday of cancer at Genesis Eldercare Long Green Center. She was 86 and had lived on Greenmount Avenue in Waverly. Miss Walker wrote four novels, including a much-praised 1954 work, "Around a Rusty God." The novel, a tale of a boy who raised goats, was translated into several languages and was condensed by Reader's Digest. Marjorie Snyder, a critic for the Boston Herald, said the book had "the simplicity and beauty of a fable; a delicate tale with universal appeal and ineffable charm."

Novelist Michael Kun writes about lost men: Men who become obsessed with television stars, resulting in restraining orders. Men who don't always know when they're lying and when they're telling the truth. Men who can only feel warm on the inside with the help of first-rate bourbon. Kun, a former Baltimorean, isn't ashamed to admit that not too long ago, he was kind of lost himself. He wasn't a drunk or a stalker. And he was someone who appeared successful to most people - he's a partner in one of the country's largest labor law firms.

It might lack the cachet of Long Island Sound, where novelist S. Scott Fitzgerald set "The Great Gatsby. " But anyone with a spare $450,000 can live in a piece of literary history - specifically the 3,600-square-foot Bolton Hill town home where Fitzgerald lived briefly. The four-bedroom, four-bathroom town home at 1307 Park Ave. is listed by Long & Foster Realtors and went on the market last Saturday. A plaque outside the residence indicates that it once housed Fitzgerald, who stayed there from 1933 until 1935 while his mercurial wife, Zelda, was being treated for schizophrenia at the nearby Sheppard Pratt Hospital.

Cynthia Earl Kerman, a retired Villa Julie College faculty member who wrote biographies of a Quaker economist and a Harlem Renaissance writer, died of pneumonia July 22 at the Glen Meadows retirement community. She was 89 and had lived in Lauraville. Born Cynthia Earl in Srinagar, Kashmir in India, where her father was teaching physical education for the YMCA, she attended the Kodaikanal School. Family members said living in India made a lasting impression on her, and she revisited the country and occasionally prepared Indian meals for her guests when entertaining.

With her 20th novel, "The Beginner's Goodbye," about to be released, Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler is already hard at work on her 21st — a "sprawling family saga that goes on and on and on" that she'll be writing backward, beginning with the ending. That way, Tyler explained in an interview broadcast on NPR on Friday morning, should she die before the book is finished, it could still be published. "Backwards, nobody would ever know whether you had reached the end you had planned," she told NPR's Lynn Neary.

Lucia St. Clair Robson's first and biggest selling novel opens with an Indian raid on a small settler outpost in 1830s East Texas — page after page of killing, scalping, torture, bondage and rape during which the 9-year-old female protagonist is carried off by the Comanches. Robson has since written about the American Revolution, and further war and occasionally other massacres in the American West, in Florida, Mexico and feudal Japan. And yet, nearly 30 years and nine published novels later, the Arnold resident is somewhat puzzled to find herself often grouped with writers of "women's novels," and even "romance novels," although she means no disrespect to these categories.

Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler has been named a finalist for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize, a biennial literary award that carries with it a cash prize of more than $96,000. Tyler, 69, is one of 13 finalists for the prize, which is awarded every other year by the Australia-based Man Group. The prize of 60,000 British pounds is given for an author's body of work and continuing contributions to world fiction. Others on this year's nominees' list include Americans Marilynne Robinson and Philip Roth.

To mix metaphors as ruthlessly as Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson mixed politics, sexual atrocities and intrigue: How does a grass-roots literary and film cult spread like wildfire — without burning itself out? That's the question publishing and movie companies have asked about the scorching sales of the novels known in English as "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest." Part of the answer lies in "Millennium: The Story," a 52-minute French documentary about Larsson's creation of gripping, labyrinthine thrillers.

Montclair, N.J. -- Dan Hurley is in his study in his small house in this picture-perfect New York suburb, his fingers flying across his computer keyboard, like a pianist warming up before a performance. It is 11 p.m. on a weekday night, and most of Montclair, including his wife and 5-month-old daughter are in bed or heading there. But Mr. Hurley is just getting to work, waiting in the virtual wings of a virtual auditorium in America Online.Across the nation, people are filing into the auditorium for this evening's performance -- 45, 55, 80, 150. Before Mr. Hurley goes on, he scopes the competition, discovering that actress Phylicia Rashad has an audience of 160 in her auditorium.

Go searching for Anne Tyler, Baltimore's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and this is what you'll find: a recipe for a spicy Chinese dish called Mapo Dofu that feeds six. A schematic diagram of the interior of a fictitious boardinghouse. A log of the weather. You will learn that it rained overnight in Baltimore on Sept. 23, 1993. But you won't learn it easily. The woman who explores the bittersweet victories and defeats of domestic life in such novels as The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons and Back When We Were Grownups hasn't granted an interview about her own domestic life since 1977.

Madison Smartt Bell loves Haiti, has many close friends there, and initially rose to prominence because of novels he wrote about the impoverished Caribbean nation. So when an earthquake that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale struck a country that has had more than its share of bad luck, Bell was worried, heartbroken - and suddenly in demand as a media expert. As he wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian: "Haitians are expert in survival against all odds. They had been doing it for a century before their nation had a name.

Danuta Mostwin, an author, psychologist and sociologist who had been a member of the Polish underground during World War II and whose fiction chronicling the experiences of Polish emigres earned her two nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature, died Monday of Parkinson's disease at her Ruxton home. She was 88. She was born Danuta Pietruszewski in Lublin, Poland, and she completed high school in Warsaw in 1939. She had planned to be a playwright, but turned her attention to studying for a medical career after the outbreak of World War II. After Germany occupied her homeland, Dr. Mostwin had to study at an underground medical school held at the University of Warsaw.