Adventures in publishing, Washington edition

August 11, 2016

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author of good fortune – or, let’s face it, no fortune at all – must be in want of an audience. And so I repaired once again, dear readers, to The DC Center for the LGBT Community’s OutWrite Book Festival in Washington, this time to read from my novel “The Penalty for Holding” – about a gay, biracial quarterback’s quest for love in the NFL. It is slated to be published next year by Less Than Three Press.

But this was also a busman’s holiday as well, as I had in mind visiting two exhibits I longed to see – “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great,” at the National Geographic Museum through Oct. 10, and “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” at the Folger Shakespeare Library through Nov. 6. What is it that the late Nora Ephron said: “Everything is copy”? Everywhere I went reminded me of what it means to be a writer. ...

The hair up there: Trump and the age of transition

July 17, 2016

We live in wondrous, terrifying, complex, fascinating times. In the United States, we are about to embark on two political conventions – the Republican July 18-21 in Cleveland and the Democratic July 25-29 in Philadelphia – that offer productive change and stasis, the future and the past, though not in the ways you might imagine.

The motif of the presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, represents the same old-same old inside Washington, while Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is the fresh, brash outlier. But in fact, we’ve been looking in a mirror, and it’s the opposite. Clinton and the Dems, with their inclusive approach to race, gender and ethnicity, signal the future, and Trump – with his appeal to angry, white, working-class men – the past. ...

Going his way: Sandy Koufax and the other ‘Last Innocents’

June 23, 2016

When I was a child, I raced home one day from school to turn on the TV to see a 20-year-old pitcher who would soon become a favorite, Jim Palmer of the Baltimore Orioles, outduel Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the 1966 World Series. It wasn’t even close. Dodger centerfielder Willie Davis lost two fly balls in the October sun and the Dodgers, defending Series’ champ, went down 6-0, losing the series in four straight.

It was the last game Koufax ever pitched for afterward he announced his retirement from baseball, having battled traumatic arthritis along with the drugs that kept it at bay for a number of years. He was just 30 years old. ...

In memoriam: Muhammad Ali (1942 -2016)

June 5, 2016

Kings and presidents die, and nobody cares, Muhammad Ali once said. But Joe Louis died, and everybody cried.

Are they crying now for Muhammad Ali, who died Friday in Scottsdale, Ariz. of complications from Parkinson’s disease? No doubt.

Boxers are perhaps the most poignant of athletes, for in a sense, they absorb the blows for the rest of us. Boxing, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates observed in her nonfiction work, “On Boxing,” is “America’s tragic theater.” ...

American Pharoah rides again

April 20, 2016

With all the talk about this year’s crop of 3-year-olds for the Kentucky Derby – Will it be the presumptive favorite Nyquist or his gray rival, Mohaymen, or Exaggerator? – I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic for American Pharoah and his glory Triple Crown run last year.

Well, we Pharoah phanatics are about to get a phix: AP is the subject of a new book by Joe Drape that was excerpted in The New York Times.

“American Pharoah,” published by Hachette Books, will be available April 26. ...

Homer in New Rochelle: More adventures in publishing

March 31, 2016

Recently, Ken Valenti – a colleague from our days at the Gannett newspapers – graciously asked me if I would read at a gathering of his group For the Love of Words at R Patisserie Café & Tea Boutique in New Rochelle, N.Y., a most collegial coffeehouse. Naturally, I said yes. What writer doesn’t love the sound of her own words, her own voice?

As usual, I practiced my go-to selection from “Water Music,” the first novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” in which tennis player Alí Iskandar becomes involved in an international incident that draws him into the circle of his soon-to-be lover, tennis star Alex Vyranos. (Given the R-rated nature of the novel, there are not many easily available go-to sections.)

But something happened as I prepared to leave for the reading: I turned on the TV to learn of the Brussels bombing. ...

‘Sudden Death’ and the fiction racket

March 15, 2016

On a recent trip to Jacksonville, Fla. via Delta, I had a disquieting thought. The flight attendants were so friendly, so generous with their drinks and snacks that I felt guilty about the scene in my debut novel “Water Music” in which an officious flight attendant denies tennis star Evan Conor Fallon an extra package of nuts, precipitating an international incident known thereafter as “Nut-gate.”

Mulling the gracious treatment I have always received while flying, I wondered how fair and realistic I had been with Nut-gate. Mustn’t fiction reflect life?

Then while at the beach house my sisters had rented on Amelia Island, I read the introduction to Alvaro Enrigue’s intriguing new novel “Sudden Death” (Riverhead Books, $27, 261 pages) – about an imaginary 16th century tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo – in which he writes something that buoyed me so much I felt as if I had made a new friend: ...