Western Book Roundup

By Jenny Shank, 8-08-07

Alan Gathright of the Rocky Mountain News recently reported on the case of Colorado’s alleged serial booknapper Thomas Pilaar, who seems to have “roamed Front Range libraries checking out thousands of books, tapes and DVDs and then selling many of them online.” Gathright writes that Pilaar “took out seven library cards from the Denver Public Library under different names, then checked out 300 items per card.  Officials said he began selling items on Craigslist.com.” Pilaar is of course innocent until proven guilty, but take a look--he’s definitely got the classic mustache of a book thief.

In more highbrow news, in this Sunday’s Denver Post Books section, David Milofsky devoted his Book Beat column to Edwin Frank, a Boulder High graduate who “went off to the storied East and a career as a poet and editor.” Frank launched the New York Review of Books Classics series. Milofsky writes, “Most people think of the New York Review as a periodical that features essays, extensive and recondite, on arcane literary subjects by distinguished intellectuals, and they aren’t wrong.  But the Classics series is different. No question the series is devoted to serious literature, but it has a wider reach than the magazine, encompassing authors as disparate as George Simenon and Alberto Moravia, Stefan Zweig and Oakley Hall.”

Okay, enough of that heady stuff from the “storied East.” Let’s swing back to the Western lowbrow, with this catty Galleycat item on Colorado and California-based writer Pam Houston, who it seems doesn’t actually write fiction.  Reporter Caramie Schnell of the Vail Daily News attended Houston’s recent workshop in Edwards, Colorado, and wrote:

“Though Houston says the lawyers at Norton, her publishing company, tell her to get up in front of the audience and say she made everything up, that her books, categorized as fiction, are not her own life. But she never has, she said - “Instead, I just lie to the lawyers,” she grinned.

Indeed, some of Houston’s contemporaries have called her the ultimate cannibal since essentially, she writes her experiences and hardly ever makes anything up. Sometimes she’s writing just 10 days behind her life, she said.”