Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Keith Graves
Penguin Young Readers Group/Philomel
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An interview with Keith Graves
The award-winning Austinite has just published his seventh kids’ book, The Unexpectedly Bad Hair of Barcelona Smith. Graves’s words are whimsical; his illustrations are bold and surreal enough to intrigue the grown-ups in the house.
While you’re writing and drawing, do you have a mental image of your reader? I channel my eight-year-old self and just try to have a good time. It’s usually not a big stretch to get there. Then I cross my fingers and hope the readers will enjoy the same stuff as me.
Your style is colorful and outlandish. Do you ever get stuck for ideas? I’ve always had a pleasant brain-vibrating response to certain color arrangements, and I’ve spent most of my working life trying to figure out how to make that juiciness happen in my own pictures. I get lots of ideas, but who knows where they come from. I’ll get a strong urge to make something—like a chigger bite that needs scratching—then I’ll start looking for satisfying subject matter.
Your Web site features an animated version of your book Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance. Is it exciting to see your inanimate children come to life? I love seeing the characters walk and talk and get into trouble on-screen. Problem is, animated films require lots of people and money to make them happen. The more people involved, the more likely it is to wander from my original idea. Still, it’s great fun to try. Philomel, $16.99
Aaron Latham
Simon & Schuster
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RIDING WITH JOHN WAYNE has a split personality. AARON LATHAM’s latest novel plays at being a murder mystery, but at heart it’s a gentle satire drawing laughs from that wellspring of excess: Hollywood. Latham drags his legendary Goodnight clan (familiar from Code of the West and The Cowboy With the Tiffany Gun ) out of Texas’s cowboying past and into the present. Novelist-cum-screenwriter Chick Goodnight finds himself transplanted from tiny Spur to the wilds of Los Angeles to turn his first book into a screenplay (kind of like when Latham adapted one of his magazine pieces for a little movie called Urban Cowboy). Then naive cousin Sharon, an aspiring actress, winds up dead. Was it the sleazy producer or the tough-guy stuntman? This is pleasantly quirky stuff, but it’s the insider-movie- biz shtick (why is the assistant director yelling that “the shark is dying”?) that leaves an impression. Simon & Schuster, $26
Lee Merrill Byrd
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
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Crafting a story about a seven-year-old burn victim is a risky move given the very good chances your novel will career into the maudlin and the morbid. Nevertheless, El Pasoan LEE MERRILL BYRD gives us RILEY’S FIRE and its rambunctious kid protagonist, Riley Martin, whose curiosity about matches and gasoline lands him in Galveston’s Shriners Burns Institute with third-degree burns over 63 percent of his body. He’s not doing so well at first, loaded up with painkillers and semiconscious; when he eventually reawakens, it’s into an alien world of scarred children and scared adults. Byrd’s approach is eloquent but plainspoken—no sensationalism or hysteria here. Riley’s Fire is more than fiction for the author, whose own two young sons were Shriners patients after a playhouse fire. But time has been a crucible of sorts, crystallizing that experience into this singularly powerful book. Algonquin, $19.95
Adam Pitluk
Da Capo Press
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At age 33, Austinite Jesus “El Matador” Chavez is the champ: He currently holds the International Boxing Federation’s lightweight title. But his career has been anything but charmed. In STANDING EIGHT, journalist ADAM PITLUK tracks Chavez (born Gabriel Sandoval in Hidalgo del Parral, Mexico) through a life of misadventure: an illegal border crossing at age 7, a prison stretch for armed robbery, and deportation as an illegal alien. Still, this biography offers a sympathetic portrait of a driven and charismatic athlete who falls victim to his own bad decisions. Pitluk is clearly captivated by the dualities of Chavez’s life— a gentle character practicing a brutal trade, a Mexican native with an American soul. It’s a compelling story whose ending has yet to be written: Was Chavez’s spirit broken by the death of opponent Leavander Johnson following their brutal September 2005 title fight, or will El Matador reenter the ring to defend that title? Da Capo, $24.95
