Newsgroup: it.fan.stephen-king
Titolo: [English] Intervista di King su Lisey

The New York Times
Published: October 4, 2006
Stephen King explores joy in marriage, grief in loss.
by Fred R. Conrad
http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/10/03/books/king600span.jpg
Stephen King clearly has little trouble invoking his muse: with more 
than 40 books to his credit, he appears to have no problem churning out 
the words, despite having famously said four years ago that he planned 
to retire.
But Mr. King, 59, best known for gripping horror fests like "Carrie" 
"The Shining" and "The Stand" says that writing a book is different from 
writing a truly good book. And that is what Mr. King believes he has 
done with "Lisey’s Story," a novel that is being published by Scribner 
on Oct. 24.
"It's like surfers and the seventh wave," he said in an August interview 
a day after playing host for a charity reading with the authors J. K. 
Rowling and John Irving at Radio City Music Hall in New York. "You ride 
six waves that are O.K., and then the seventh one is really great." But 
with every seventh wave, you mess up the ride, "so really it's only 
every 49th wave that's really a great, great wave, and I felt that way 
with 'Lisey'."
This time out, Mr. King, one of the few true rock stars of the book 
world, has written a novel that like "Bag of Bones," from 1998, or the 
novellas of "Different Seasons," published in 1982, does not entirely 
forgo horrific elements, but certainly transcends them. At its heart, 
"Lisey's Story" is a book about a marriage and the journey through grief 
that a widow — the title's Lisey — makes after the death of her husband, 
Scott Landon, also a rock star of the book world.
Told from her point of view, the novel is a vibrant celebration of 
language, particularly the shared patois of marriage. The book is 
peppered with vivid words like "Incunks" (the couple's name for the 
professors who study Scott's work, and then, after his death, pressure 
Lisey to donate his papers) or "bad-gunky" (Scott's reference to the 
madness that sometimes overtakes him and other members of his family).
And those horrific elements? Scott, and later Lisey, travel back and 
forth to an alternate world, both beautiful and monstrous, known as 
"Boo'ya Moon."
Mr. King's name on the spine of a book generally guarantees a best 
seller. But in what has become a long-running theme for him, Mr. King 
wants readers, and critics, to recognize that he isn't a hack.
"You get a reputation as a best seller, and you immediately get hung 
with a label" that you must write for the lowest common denominator, he 
said, sitting easily in a chair in his Upper East Side hotel suite, 
wearing a blue T-shirt, jeans and a pair of Merrill suede moccasins. 
"All I've tried to do is to work hard and get better."
With "Lisey's Story," he added, "I'm not saying that it's deathless 
prose, or it's a classic, but I'm saying that I'm surprised I had this 
book in me. It's a lucky book."
While his publisher is planning an initial print run of about 1.1 
million copies, it has pushed the novel almost as if it were written by 
an up-and-coming author on the verge of a breakout book.
Early in the spring, Scribner sent out 7,000 galleys to booksellers and 
people in the press, the most it has distributed since "Bag of Bones." 
In fact, the publisher did not send out any advance reading copies of 
Mr. King's "Cell" when it was published earlier this year because it 
figured most of them would end up on eBay before the book went on sale 
in stores; Scribner has already asked eBay to remove at least a dozen 
copies of "Lisey's Story" from the site.
Susan Moldow, Scribner's publisher, said the company courted independent 
booksellers, some of whom tend to ignore Mr. King's books because they 
assume that the discount chains will sell most of them.
"We wanted to convince them, both because of the content of the book and 
because Stephen King's readers are all over, that they should highlight 
it and take their own market share," Ms. Moldow said.
The sales push intrigued Margaret Maupin, a buyer at the Tattered Cover, 
an independent bookstore in Denver. The store ordered about one-third 
more copies than it usually does for one of Mr. King's novels, Ms. 
Maupin said, hoping to attract new readers.
In what sounds like a pitch for a challenging novel in translation, Ms. 
Maupin said she wanted to sell "Lisey's Story" to people who had 
previously spurned Mr. King's work. "We're saying, 'Stretch yourself a 
little bit,' " she said.
Mr. King started writing "Lisey" three years ago, while recovering from 
a severe bout of pneumonia that landed him in the hospital for nearly a 
month, his second brush with mortality after being hit by a van in Maine 
in 1999. The seed of the novel, he said, came after he had returned from 
the hospital and his wife, Tabitha, had started renovating his office. 
When he walked into the room, in a converted barn, the rugs were gone, 
and most of his books and papers were boxed up.
"I went in there, and I could barely walk, and I could barely breathe," 
he recalled. "I thought, this is what places look like when somebody's 
died. I thought to myself, this is what it is like to be a ghost."
But what he really wanted to do, he said, was "write a book about a 
woman who was the actual driving force of a marriage to a famous man." 
Although his own wife is an obvious role model, Mr. King is quick to 
point out the differences: Tabitha King is a novelist in her own right, 
while Lisey doesn't work. The Kings have three children, and the Landons 
have none. Still, he said, "Lisey's supposed to be about finding 
somebody who understands what it's like to live that life of the 
imagination."
He added, "Not everybody is comfortable with that, and when you find 
somebody who is - in that sense Tabby is like Lisey."
Because he was writing in a woman's voice, Mr. King asked Nan Graham, 
the editor in chief at Scribner, to edit the book instead of Chuck 
Verrill, Mr. King's longstanding personal editor. Ms. Graham said she 
helped with pacing and honing the title character. "Lisey became a 
little more complex and compelling," she said.
In the novel Scott Landon is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the 
National Book Award who writes blockbuster best sellers. Mr. King has 
never won either prize, although he was awarded, somewhat 
controversially, a medal for distinguished contribution to American 
letters by the National Book Foundation in 2003.
"It's a way of saying to the reader, 'Don't start out with the idea that 
Scott Landon is Stephen King,' " he said, "because that's not the case."
Nevertheless, such details can make a reader wonder if he might, just a 
little bit, be writing an insouciant kiss-off to the literary 
establishment. Mr. King insisted that wasn't his plan, but then 
proceeded to rant about critics who, he said, had "made their ignorance 
of their own popular culture a virtue."
He said he was more concerned about underrated authors he has championed 
than for himself. "For myself, I'm read, I'm feeding my family, so I 
feel pretty good," he said. "In the end, it doesn't matter, because 
either the books survive, or they don't. I'm going to be dead, and God, 
I hope that they will survive, but it's out of my hands."
The intense focus on language in "Lisey" comes as something of a shift 
for him. In his early days Mr. King confessed that a story's concept 
superseded the language. In an interview in The New York Times Magazine, 
Mr. King once said: "Love of the word wasn't first. It was second." Now, 
he said, language is "more important than it used to be."
Part of that change, he said, was that he was reading more poetry. Among 
his favorites are D. H. Lawrence, Richard Wilbur and James Dickey.
"You get older, you find out time is shorter, and you read stuff that 
you've missed before," he said. "You say, 'I can't wait forever anymore 
to read Eudora Welty.' I finally got to Eudora Welty, so maybe I'm just 
meeting a better class of literary person."
Mr. King spooked fans with his threat of retirement a few years ago. "I 
didn't feel good," he said. "I was in a lot of pain from the accident."
But somehow, he couldn't stop writing. "When I started to feel better, I 
felt like I wanted to work," he said. "What else am I going to do? I 
don't parasail."
-- 
ciao

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
news:YMwVg.16066$pp1....@tornado.fastwebnet.it...
The New York Times
Published: October 4, 2006
Stephen King explores joy in marriage, grief in loss.
by Fred R. Conrad
http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/10/03/books/king600span.jpg
certo che almeno i calzini poteva metterli puliti per la foto.....