James Sallis is crazy about Walter Tevis, a native San Franciscan, pointing out that by Tevis’s own admission, The Man Who Fell to Earth is “a very disguised autobiography.” The now famous book had been rejected multiple times by publishers, despite Tevis’s remarkable success with The Hustler. Here’s an audio interview with Tevis from 1983 just before his death. And last August, Bookslut’s Michael Schaub took a look at The Queen’s Gambit. And back in 1999, both The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth were named by Jonathan Lethem as two examples of great novels overshadowed by their film adaptations

Angry Asian Man, among many others, is interviewed about the sexual identity of the Asian male by the L.A. Times .

At a Canadian bookstore, a discussion of Howard Rotberg’s The Second Catastrophe was interrupted by an Iraqi Kurd and Palestinian taking umbrage with Rotberg’s words and ethnicity and spouting off antisemitic epithets. But the two hecklers wouldn’t be arrested because Rotberg shouted back at them.

Hari Kunzru, who nabbed a cool �1.2 million for The Impressionist, hopes to repeat his success with his second novel. “I’ve become so used to the good life that I can’t imagine going back to pauperhood,” said Kunzru. “Writing isn’t just a testament to my abilities. It’s also about stock options.”

Worst. Apartment. Ever. And here I was thinking that I was a bit messy. (via Six Different Ways)