--What was the competition between John Updike and Norman Mailer about?

--John Updike was described in Richard Crasta’s novel as the Poet of What?

--What are the orchids on the paperback version of the UK edition of The Revised Kama Sutra supposed to represent?

--Which former lover of Saul Bellow said the fastest yes in the West?

And why was he in the same room with Jackie Kennedy, and what was he thinking? Who were the other famous or powerful people he met along the way, and what was their role in his story? What, as a direct result of his financial difficulties and as a result of his struggles with literary apartheid, happened to his young and dearly beloved children? What does this mean, and what are the lessons and truths to be learned? What has the System to do with this, and what is its agenda?

The answer is so complex, it is so interwoven with subjects such as dreams, obsessions, passions, literature, race, power, feminism, lust, publishing, and fatherhood, India and America that it cannot be told in a few paragraphs. It took fourteen years for Richard Crasta to live and write his answer to these questions, an answer that is contained in a 218-page book of which the first reader, not a professional critic, and all the more important because she was not a critic, but a voice of the people, of the everyday man or woman in the street, responded thus:

What The Player was to the Hollywood establishment and cinema, The Killing of an Author is to book publishing and writing. What Michael Moore has done to the political Establishment of the United States, The Killing of an Author does to the Publishing Establishment. It is the kind of story that might interest Rosie O’Donnell, Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, NPR, and perhaps even Oprah Winfrey—if Oprah is willing to take the book for what it has and is remarkable about it, and to ignore what it has but what may go against her political philosophy.

This is as much of a classic immigrant story (because true, and uncompromisingly forthright) as any of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories. In fact, it is all the more important as a piece of history, a corrective to the myths, the delusions, and the fantasies sold by the media.

So far, America and by extension the world (so powerful is American influence today on what gets read) has been treated to The Elite Truth about India, doled out by Indian writers who are born to wealthy or highly educated and well-connected parents (Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai), or come from upper-middle class families and are educated at prestigious universities like Oxford. They write extremely well, they are great entertainers, it is true. But their truth is not the Whole Truth. Something is missing from this picture, and as such, the picture is a bit wrong, a bit fake. The Killing of an Author provides a much needed corrective. It is a book that will shock you, make you laugh, cry, and touch you deeply.

Read Killing of an Author Interview (April 2008)

RICHARD CRASTA’s highly praised comic-literary novel The Revised Kama Sutra has been published in ten countries and in seven languages. This is his sixth book. He was born in India, has been a resident of New York for the last twenty years, but spends much of his time in Asia.

CONTENTS

Preface

PART I: THE EARLY HISTORY

1. Humble Beginnings. 11

2. The Scott Meredith Literary Agency 15

3. Columbia & Should You Join an MFA Program? 27

4. The Redheaded Editor and the P.C. Manual for Bushmen 43

5. Breadloaf, Garp, and the Things We Carry in our Pants 58

PART II: ECSTASY AND TORTURE

6. The Fastest “Yes!” in the West 70

7. Saul Bellow’s Woman, and The Pope’s Man 73

8. Divorce and its Discontents 91

9. Other Voices, Other Letters 99

10. Like the Vatican Welcoming Luther or, How Supergirl Irene . . . 107

PART III: THE BIRTH & KILLING OF AN AUTHOR

11. An Author is Born: The Strange World of a Best-Selling Indian Author 124

12. The Intellectual Skinheads of Britain, or Octerlony Revisited. 136

13. Life After Penguin: Publishing and P.R. with the Wolves and the Jackals

14. The System and the Killing of Subversive Authors

15. The Damages

16. Taboos

EPILOGUE
Appendix i: Tales of Shame from Benzo and Antidepressant Land
Appendix ii: The Editor and the Writer (or the Naked Editor)
Appendix iii: The Five Pillars of Oppression

[Thank you for giving] a mind-blowing erotic education to this sexual hick . . . [Is it really true that you] spent about two pages on a great description of [young cats]?—Author, writing to John Updike.

I dashed up to [Pope of the Male Universe Robert Bly] and said something like Psst, want to see some real-man fiction—the story of Iron Vijay? Then I passed him the standard brown envelope with three testosterone-drenched chapters and said, “Read it, please,” in my best “I have no Hunter Daddy” voice.

FIRST Meeting WITH Saul Bellow’s agent

 I met Harriet at her cramped, but well-appointed office, elegant bookshelves filled with the books of the big boys (and not a single lightweight in sight).  She talked to me about film rights, discussed some of the actors who might be in a movie of the book, chatted about her friendship with Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, told me her commission would be ten percent.  And when I mentioned some of John Irving's suggestions on improving my novel, such as shifting to a third person narrator, she said, with quiet confidence, "You can teach John Irving a few things."

A wild overstatement, but what more could a writer ask for?  Really speaking, John Irving was leagues ahead of me in a dozen different fields including wrestling, but if I had had a fraction of Harriet’s confidence and hubris—while being cunning enough never to put it down on paper, to seem perpetually astonished, humble, and self-deflating—I would be in much better shape today.

RICHARD MAREK AND THE EDUCATION OF EDITORS

The conference was also visited by Richard Marek, a tall, white-haired, balding editor.  He told us a funny anecdote about how he almost missed publishing Jonathan L. Seagull, that immortal bird in a million, the bird that made millions and made him, poor Dick Marek, fly (see his wings, everybody?).  His speech was filled with the crowing arrogance of a man who thinks his editorial power licenses him to give writers a lot of condescending advice such as: Don’t tell an editor that you think a book will do well.  An editor may choose any book he wants, and has absolutely no obligation to publish a book just because it is good.  In other words: heads we call the shots; tails you lose. Was he speaking to some conference of time-share salesmen?  He should have known, through an elementary reading of the history of literature, including of writers like Alexander Pope (who like the great Indian writer Shivaram Karanth always quarreled with his publishers), that if we writers were sheepishly obedient followers of complicated commandments on how to behave with editors, we simply wouldn’t be writers, or we would be mediocre writers. And that all this bull that writers should spend months and months perfecting the art of querying editors and agents and paying hundreds of dollars for “query-writing” workshops is an impertinence and a total waste of a writer’s precious time. (Why not a workshop in the art of seducing and sleeping with editors, which might at least consume less of a writer’s time, and be pleasurable to both parties? At the time, surrogate sexual therapy was hot and often administered by luscious ex-Soviets, and it would have been easy to have some of them master editorial jargon and train writers in the art of sleeping with editors for mutual profit and pleasure.) Seriously, I think it would be much more honest, wise, humble, and in the order of justice—writers being the true sages and bards of society, not editors—if, instead, editors took courses, from psychiatrists and behaviorists, on how to understand and be sensitive to a wide variety of writers, including those who simply do not have tact or organization in their clay, who are tormented and therefore end up messing up their personal and sometimes business relationships. And also, if they traveled to Third World countries and met the type of people they normally didn’t, and had an understanding of a wider world than Third Avenue and Soho .

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