''If you'd gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today,'' William Gibson told The Paris Review recently, ''they'd have read your proposal and said: 'Well, it's impossible. This is ridiculous.' '' You'd have gotten a similar reaction if you'd gone...
''A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,'' Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel ''Fountain City'' -- a novel, he adds, that he could feel ''erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.'' And so Chabon fought back: he killed ''Fountain City''...
LOSING MY COOL How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture. By Thomas Chatterton Williams. Penguin Press, $24.95. Fanwood, N.J., does not have a literary pedigree, or even a downtown bookstore, and yet it has produced a very talented writer. In this memoir, Williams is transformed from a skinny teenager who shoots hoops, gets into...