Word: simonal
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Henry Fool--what a guy! He materializes, like the answer to a dark prayer, in a Queens neighborhood where a sanitation worker named Simon Grim (the glumly funny James Urbaniak) is literally lying in the street waiting for...something. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan, pinwheeling raffish charisma) has everything, and too much of it. He swaggers, smokes, guzzles beer, grabs life by the butt and gives it a fat smack. He makes abrupt love to Simon's morbid mother (Maria Porter) and bored sister (Parker Posey). He is, he tells Simon, an artist, the author of a huge, unpublished tome called...
Dwelling in the sulfurously lighted basement apartment of Simon's house, Henry is the Devil--a devil, anyway--with a gift for inspiring those he does not repel. An apt pupil, Simon composes a long poem that some people hate ("Drop dead," reads a publisher's rejection note; "keep your day job") but others champion. Simon becomes a literary celebrity, and in gratitude to his mentor says he will insist that his publisher also issue Henry's opus. Then, alas, he reads...
...Simon & Schuster...
...wary reader, overdosed these many years on both Hemingway lore and mystical guff about fishing, and weary, in addition, of all too believable accounts of alcoholic decline, might tune in to Championship Bowling and leave Lorian Hemingway's memoir on the nightstand. Fair enough, but Walk on Water (Simon and Schuster; 250 pages; $23), though it does deal with booze and fishing addictions (the first deadly, the second a kind of soul's balancing act, said to be curative), is chiefly the record of a writer growing up and learning her trade...
...Simon & Schuster senior editor Bob Bender is a brave man. Unconcerned with the author's reputation, Bender's company is rejecting a book proposal from convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, according to the New York Daily News. The four-page handwritten proposal, in which Kaczynski claims his lawyers misrepresented him during his trial, arrived earlier this month. The last time Kaczynski sent out a book proposal -- for his turgid 35,000-word tract "Industrial Society and Its Future" -- he made it clear that there'd be more than checks in the mail if it wasn't published. Then again...