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Page 2
HOLLYWOOD HORROR
Miller's talents come through in this sad tale of an actress mother, a famous photographer grandmother, a perverted football player father, and a girlfriend who doubles as a prostitute. Those characters are family to the novel's narrator, a 15-year-old child movie star who's addicted to smack and has outgrown his job. His famous grandma has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and he must confront his father about incest. Although The Mao Game in synopsis would seem unrelentingly depressing, Miller employes a sense of humor that provides the novel's saving grace. He's the son of actor/playwright Jason Miller, best known for starring in The Exorcist. Miller's mother is writer Susan Bernard, and his grandfather was the famous Bernard of Hollywood, perhaps the most renowned photographer of Filmland's golden era. Joshua Miller will star in the film version of The Mao Game. STYLIST SCORES BIG Yoel Hoffman teaches Eastern Philosophy at the University of Haifa. His writing is distilled magic in his brilliant avant-garde novel Bernard (New Directions, $22.95). Set in 1940s Palestine, the story centers on a German-Jewish widower trying to cope with World War II, the death of his wife, his Arab neighbors, and a complex and compelling inner world. In 192 pages of one-paragraph chapters that seldom exceed a single page, Hoffman delivers a testament of one man's life that pulses with humor while confronting some of the world's darkest times. Bernard is a stunning piece of literature, written by an author of remarkable talent and range, a book that brings small pleasures on nearly every page. A WRITER FROM KENTUCKY Janice Holt Giles didn't begin to write until after her 41st birthday, but the bestsellers kept coming. The Oklahoma-born novelist who lived in Kentucky most of her adult life wrote 24 novels between 1950 and 1975, selling into the millions. It's been nearly 20 years since her death at age 74, and the new biography, Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life (University Press of Kentucky, $25) is the first account of her life. Dianne Watkins Stuart has written an absorbing assessnment of Giles, who sought to give "the permanence of art to nature and folklife and imbue it with goodness, valor, and human triumph." A PERSONAL NOTE For about a year at Suite 101, I have been writing the semi-weekly column, Today's Fiction. In order to expand horizons and deal with non-fiction as well as fiction, the column's title become New Books and will appear every Friday.
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