writer

The blood of the dragon is headed to the big screen.

A “Game of Thrones” movie is in development at Warner Bros. written by “House of Cards” showrunner Beau Willimon, The Times has confirmed. According to Page Six, which first reported Willimon’s involvement, the “Andor” alum has already submitted a first draft.

While details of the plot have yet to be confirmed, the film will reportedly center Aegon the Conqueror, who was the first Targaryen monarch to sit atop the Iron Throne in the world of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO is also developing the story of Aegon’s conquest of Westeros as a potential drama series.

King Aegon I is the Targaryen who started it all. Around 300 years before the events of “Game of Thrones,” the dragonlord led a campaign, with his sister-wives Visenya and Rhaenys, to conquer six of the seven kingdoms of Westeros. He was the first ruler of the unified realm and launched the Targaryen dynasty.

His descendants revere Aegon the Conqueror so highly that he has numerous prominent namesakes. King Aegon II, whose controversial coronation is what sparked the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of Dragons, is a key character in the “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon” (portrayed by Tom Glynn-Carney). In “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” adapted from Martin’s “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas, young Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) is revealed to be the missing prince Aegon Targaryen. Even “Game of Thrones” eventually revealed that the show’s beloved Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) was a Targaryen named Aegon.

Other previously reported “Game of Thrones” spinoffs in the works include an animated project about “House of the Dragons” character Corlys Velaryon, also known as the Sea Snake.

The third season of “House of the Dragon” will premiere in June.

Tayari Jones was feeling intense pressure to deliver a follow-up to her 2018 bestseller, “An American Marriage.” She was three years past her publisher’s deadline. Worse, she had begun to suffer symptoms of what was ultimately diagnosed as Graves’ disease, a serious autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. At the time she didn’t know what was causing pain in her right leg and the intense itching on her arms, legs and torso — or why her handwriting had “gone funky.” Meanwhile, 200 pages in, the novel she owed Knopf Publisher and Editor in Chief Jordan Pavlin wasn’t coming together.

She confided to a close friend, “This book got me feeling like a clown right now.” Jones began to doubt that she was ‘worthy’ of another literary success.

“You know how musicians say ‘that band was swinging’? I wasn’t swinging,” Jones, who lives in Atlanta, tells me during a recent phone call.

She says she turned to an empty notebook, and began word doodling — scrawling random words, going wherever her pen took her. “Kin,” the magnificent novel that emerged, is out now. Oprah recently announced that it’s her latest book club pick (the second time Jones has been honored with the selection).

“Kin: A Novel” by Tayari Jones

(Knopf)

“Kin” was supposed to have been an entirely different book — an of-the-moment novel about gentrification in the New South — but what materialized from Jones’ creative experiment was a tiny Louisiana town called Honeysuckle, amid the 1950s and Jim Crow. Then, as Jones puts it, “Annie and Vernice [her main characters] introduced themselves.” All of Jones’ previous fiction has been contemporary, and at first she didn’t know what to make of the path Annie and Vernice were leading her on. “I don’t write historical,” observes Jones, “I’m a writer of my own era.” Not to mention she’d always been suspicious of writers who claim their characters came to them fully realized.

Even at that point, Jones still believed Vernice and Annie might just be part of a larger backstory, perhaps parents to protagonists she had yet to conjure. “So I stuck with it to find out.” The more she wrote, the more the puzzle pieces began to fit together. Annie’s journey out of Louisiana takes her through a sharecropping brothel in Mississippi, then on to Memphis where she is convinced she will find and reunite with her mother. Meanwhile, Vernice attends Spelman (the HBCU Jones is a ’91 graduate of).

Jones began to suspect that she’d had a previously undetected ulterior motive for moving her book to the past. She wondered if “Kin” was actually an effort to better understand her parents, particularly her mother, a former economist who’d been active in the civil rights movement. “My mother is a very tight-lipped person,” Jones says. “I knew very little about her life, and maybe this was my imagination trying to crack the code.”

Jones’ progress wasn’t without its setbacks. She was deep into the writing of “Kin” when her Graves’ disease flared in earnest. Her blood pressure spiked. She got winded just climbing the stairs to her bedroom. She landed in the emergency room with a life-threatening “thyroid storm,” requiring surgery and daily medication. Then her eyesight deteriorated, which necessitated a month of radiation. But she powered through, and sent off the manuscript.

Jones’ editor, Pavlin, admits the novel she received was a surprise. “But it was as perfect a novel as I’ve ever read,” she says. “No publisher in their right mind would stand on anything as insignificant as a contractual description in the face of such a work.”

“Kin” deftly alternates points of view between Vernice and Annie, narrating events by way of a vernacular that would be at home on a front porch rocking chair. When Annie takes a job at a nightclub in Memphis, she says of its penny-pinching owner: “The man was tight as a skeeter’s teeter.” Jones is equally adept at the delicate prose, as in this description of a well-worn family Bible: “The paper, thin as butterfly wings, was heavy with wisdom.”

While Jones had Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” in mind while writing “Kin,” her take on the subject is singular. “Vernice and Annie remain friends because each of them is the keeper of the other’s true self,” she says. “Friendship is particularly meaningful because it’s a relationship you’re constantly recommitting to — reupping.”

Now that “Kin” is out in the world, and Jones has weathered the bumpy road to publication day, we asked her if she’s nervous about how it will be received eight years after her previous novel was published. “I am not ambitious now in the way I was then,” she says. “I’ve learned what success can and cannot do for a person. You have to learn to be satisfied. People say ‘don’t rest on your laurels,’ but what are laurels for?”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of the KCRW radio show “Bookworm” — known for interviews of authors so in depth that they sometimes left his subjects astounded at his breadth of knowledge of their work — has died. He was 73.

Silverblatt died Saturday at home after a protracted illness, a close friend confirmed.

Although Silverblatt’s 30-minute show, which ran from 1989 to 2022 and was nationally syndicated, included interviews with celebrated authors including Gore Vidal, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith, the real star of the show was the host himself, the nasal-voiced radio personality who more than once in life was told he did not have a voice for his medium.

His show represents one of the most significant archives of conversations with major literary powerhouses from the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

But Silverblatt knew that he was as much a character as the people he interviewed.

“I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland,” he said during a talk in front of the Cornell University English department in 2010. “I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”

Born in 1952, the Brooklyn native learned to love reading as a child when he was introduced to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Neighbors would see him walking the streets of Brooklyn with his head in a book and would sometimes call his parents out of fear he might get hurt.

But until he left home for the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, at the age of 16, Silverblatt has said, he had never met an author.

His college, however, was filled with such famous authors as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and J.M. Coetzee, who were all working as professors.

Silverblatt was shy and too embarrassed to speak during class because of his inability to clearly pronounce the letter “L,” which appears three times in his own name. Yet he considered the authors to be his friends, even if they did not know it yet, he said during the Cornell talk.

He would approach them after class to speak about their work.

Despite his interest in literature, Silverblatt’s parents wanted him to become a mail carrier, he said. The summer after his freshman year, Silverblatt worked a New York City mail route, delivering letters to the mayor’s mansion on an Upper East Side route that took him past numerous old bookstores and used-books shops. During that job, he said in the Cornell talk, he purchased the complete works of Charles Dickens.

Silverblatt moved to Los Angeles after college in the mid-1970s and worked in Hollywood in public relations and script development.

Like many young writers in Los Angeles, he wrote a script that never got made.

It was in Los Angeles that Silverblatt met Ruth Seymour, the longtime head of KCRW.

Seymour had just returned to the United States from Russia and was at a dinner party where everyone was discussing Hollywood. There, she and Silverblatt became immersed in a one-on-one discussion of Russian poetry.

“He’s a great raconteur and so the rest of the world just vanished,” Seymour told Times columnist Lynell George in 1997. “Afterward I just turned and asked him: ‘Have you ever thought about doing radio?’”

For the next 33 years, that’s exactly what he thought about.

“Michael was a genius. He could be mesmerizing and always, always, always brilliant,” said Alan Howard, who edited “Bookworm” for 31 years.

“It’s an extraordinary archive that exists, and I don’t think anyone else has ever created such an archive of intelligent, interesting people being asked about their work,” Howard said. “Michael was very proud of the show. He devoted his life to the show.”

Silverblatt once dreamed of being on the other side of the microphone, as a writer in his own right, Howard said. But he faced bouts of writer’s block through his 20s and gave up writing.

“Eventually, he came to find peace with the reality of that,” Howard said.

Instead of writing, he became an accumulator of a vast amount of other writers’ work — in his library as well as the repository in his head. He had an incredible memory for the books he read.

Silverblatt converted the apartment next to his Fairfax apartment into a library where he kept thousands of books, Howard said.

“It was heaven,” he said. “It was a fabulous library.”

“He was such a singular person,” said Jennifer Ferro, now the president of KCRW. “He had a voice you would never expect would be on radio.”

Alan Felsenthal, a poet who considered Silverblatt a mentor, called Silverblatt’s voice “sensitive and tender.”

Felsenthal said the show was about creating a space of “infinite compassion,” where writers could share things they might not share in everyday conversation.

“Michael was one of a kind, truly singular. And his voice is too,” Felsenthal said.

One of the most important tenets of Silverblatt’s approach was that he not only read the book he was discussing on his show that day, but also read the entire oeuvre of the authors he interviewed.

“A significant writer would come in and be bowled over by Michael’s depth of vision of the work at hand,” Howard said.

David Foster Wallace, in one interview, said he wanted Silverblatt to adopt him.

Silverblatt said he strove to read an author’s entire body of work, but he never claimed to have read it all if he hadn’t.

“In general I try to read the author’s complete work. … That’s not always true, and I never say it if it isn’t true. But more often than not, I have, at least, read the majority of the work. And sometimes it’s a superhuman challenge,” he said in the 1997 Times column.

The voracious reader said that the best books, those that brought him happiness, were not the ones that ease our way in this strange and difficult world.

“The books I love the most made it harder for me to live,” he said.

Silverblatt is survived by his sister, Joan Bykofsky.

“A generation ago, midlife might have been a bit of a snore, right? You have your job you’re going to be in for your whole career. You have your house in the suburbs … I don’t think established adulthood is that established anymore,” author Emily Nemens told me from her home in Princeton, N.J., before heading out on a cross-country book tour. “It’s much more pressurized and uncertain.”

This is the foundation of the former Paris Review editor’s sweeping and exquisite sophomore novel, “Clutch,” which features an ensemble cast of five women — all 40, give or take, and longtime friends — who reunite in Palm Springs, each at their own trying crossroads.

Nemens is no stranger to writing group dynamics; her critically acclaimed debut novel, “The Cactus League,” is structured in interlinked stories. She wrote it while juggling a distinguished career at literary quarterlies and making a name for herself as an artist. In the 2010s, her watercolor portraits of U.S. congresswomen went viral for their commentary on political portraiture and the “power suit.” At the time, women made up only 17% of Congress. Her new work also draws on politics — “Clutch” is set in an era shaped by the Dobbs decision and the state of women’s health in America.

The Times talked to Nemens about favoring friendship on the page, bodily autonomy and her influences including California artist Wayne Thiebaud — whose painting “Supine Woman” is featured on the cover of her novel.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

When did the idea for “Clutch” first come to you?

I went to Palm Springs with my girlfriends. The dynamics, the friction of getting people together who love each other a lot but haven’t seen each other for quite a long time was eventful and felt like something to write about.

On your inspiration for the novel: You’ve previously mentioned Mary McCarthy’s novel “The Group,” which has also been cited as a precursor to “Sex and the City.” How far have we come since “The Group” was published in 1963? How about “Sex and the City” in the late ‘90s? “

McCarthy was writing in the ‘50s and ‘60s about the ‘30s and “The Group” was meant to highlight all the progress women had (and hadn’t) made in this new society, new economy, new technologies, birth controls coming on. There’s a certain amount of new liberation that came purportedly in the ‘30s, purportedly in the ‘60s, purportedly in the ‘90s. I mean, progress is certainly being made. You and I can get birth control and have our own credit cards, but there’s also a lot of things that don’t feel great. A reigning plotline in “Clutch” is about reproductive freedom in Texas in the 2020s and just how devastating that was for so many people who care about bodily autonomy, and that doesn’t feel very different than it did in the 1930s.

“Clutch” puts a cast of millennial girlfriends front and center.

Yeah, I’ve read a lot of books I admire about singular protagonists. A woman rebelling from a marriage or striking out from the role of motherhood or otherwise trying to find meaning. These novels about a singular quest. And I just kept coming up against that and thought: What happens when you try to build the infrastructure of friendships on the page?

We get intimate access to each of these five women — a writer, litigator, ENT physician, an actor turned politician and a consultant turned caretaker. All of them live in various parts of the country, including California, Texas and New York. It must have been hard to balance so many perspectives, plotlines and an omniscient narrator on top of it all.

I broke a lot of rules with that third ping-ponging perspective. Sometimes perspectives shift within a page, within a scene, moving rapidly and gleefully between points of view, and using that omniscient voice to steer us around — that was fun. I was cognizant of balance and understanding the lazy-Susan of it. Making sure I was spinning all the way around the table and touching each piece in each storyline.

Why midlife?

I love a bildungsroman as a novel conceit and as a framing device. But, sometimes, moving beyond that realization of the adult you want to be and actually being that adult is harder and more complicated and maybe more interesting, at least as I am and perceive it right now.

You’ve worked as an editor in some of the literary world’s most prestigious posts, notably at the Paris Review. Do you miss it since pivoting toward your own writing and teaching?

Making magazines was a thrill and a gift and exhausting. In that order. Not every editor is quite as catholic with a little c, as ecumenical, as excited about such a range of writing as I am. I wanted to see not one style of writing, but a broad range of writing that I felt had both ambition and execution.

One of the things that’s hard about being an editor, particularly an acquiring editor, is how often you have to say no. As a teacher now, I never say no. I say “yes.” Instead, I ask: What else can this be doing? That attitude adjustment is glorious.

Back to “Clutch,” what does female friendship mean to you? Do you see your friends’ qualities in these five women?

Female friendship has been such a gift. I don’t have children, I have a really supportive partner and I have this wonderful, creative professional life, but I can’t imagine it without my friends. There are certainly flints of autobiography and different friends in different characters — they’ve read it and liked it, and if they saw themselves, they were pleasant about it.

Tell me about the painting on the cover of the book. It really speaks to what these women are going through.

Getting the rights to the painting was a real coup! It’s called “Supine Woman” by Wayne Thiebaud. It was painted in 1963 — its own little Easter egg is that it came out the same year as “The Group.”

It depicts a woman dressed all in white who is lying on the floor. You’d assume from the pose that she’s sleeping, except her eyes are wide open, and in this frightened or startled expression. To me, it’s indicative of what the women in “Clutch” are going through. This is that moment right after you get knocked down, right before you get up again and that emotional tenor proceeds for a lot of the novel.

Lancaster is a London-based writer of fiction, fashion editorial and screenplays.

Poor Sylvia Plath has found little rest in the afterlife.

The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm had choice words for the army of Plath’s biographers. She likened this species of writer to “the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”

Plath, the deserted wife of fellow poet Ted Hughes, mother of two young children, died by suicide at age 30, leaving behind a collection of poems that anatomized her mental descent in scorching language that secured a permanent place in American letters. More than 60 years have passed since her death in 1963, yet the literary myth that has taken the name Sylvia Plath lives on.

I confess I’m not impervious to the posthumous allure. When visiting friends who were staying in the Primrose Hill area of London a few years ago, I would pass by the flat that Plath shared with her husband there and stare wonderingly at the town house, adorned with a blue plaque commemorating its former resident.

“Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia,” a new play by Beth Hyland that opened Thursday at the Geffen Playhouse, is set in a different apartment that the couple shared. This cozily claustrophobic home is located in Boston’s historic Beacon Hill district in the period before they had children and were striving anxiously to realize their early promise.

As Sylvia (Marianna Gailus) and Ted (Cillian O’Sullivan) confront the problems that will eventually drive them apart, two contemporary married writers who have taken up residence at the Boston address grapple with many of the same issues (marital discord, competitive egos and mental health woes) as their more famous literary predecessors.

World premieres are risky, and the writing for this one hasn’t yet settled. The play’s split focus, moving between 1958 and the present, is a sign of conceptual ambition. But Hyland struggles to find the pacing and rhythm of her complicated vision.

Sally (Midori Francis), a writer whose first book was a big hit but whose second book is long overdue, and Theo (Noah Keyishian), who just found out he won a major literary prize for his first novel and is now up for a game-changing job at Columbia University, are at different points in their careers. Sally is processing both the shock of a miscarriage and her ambivalence about her marriage.

She’s also worried that her publisher is going to make her pay back the advance for the book about Plath and Hughes that she’s been unable to make any headway on. “I have to finish the draft,” she tells Theo. “If I can’t do that when I’m living in their apartment, I should honestly just kill myself.”

Clearly, Sally is having a hard time holding it together. The precarious state of her mind forces us to question whether Sylvia and Ted are ghosts, hallucinations or literary inventions sprung to life. But these characters are initially presented as objectively real. We meet them before we meet Sally and Theo, and whether they are figments or not, they are unmistakably haunting the new occupant who’s writing about them.

Unfortunately, these illustrious figures are badly written and stiffly played. O’Sullivan can’t keep Ted’s accent straight, and Gailus seems to be offering a Ryan Murphy version of Plath.

Marianna Gailus, left, and Cillian O’Sullivan in “Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia” at Geffen Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Sally may be struggling to give Sylvia and Ted life on the page, but Hyland is having her own trouble ushering them to the stage. The word “factitious” kept coming to mind. Artificiality might be the point, but it’s not one that gives much pleasure in the theater.

Who wants to sit through a fictitious novelist’s clumsy drafts? The scenes between Sally and Theo are more convincing, but the dynamic between them grinds on snappishly. Theo tries his best to be a sensitive and supportive husband, but Sally can’t seem to get what she needs from him. And as her marriage and literary career fall apart, her psychiatric problems intensify.

Writing in a desperate junk-food-fueled all-nighter, Sally appears to have entered a manic phase. Theo, terrified that she might make another suicide attempt, looks on helplessly. Their small, spare yet tasteful apartment (the work of the collective Studio Bent) turns into a marital pressure cooker as Theo’s fortunes rise and Sally’s self-belief craters.

Hyland captures the parallels between the two couples. Her Ted is a patriarchal monster, controlling, moody and sexually malignant. Theo is far more psychologically evolved, but he has his own blind spots that provoke Sally, who’s more emancipated than Sylvia but less professionally assured and just as unstable.

The times are vastly different, but the balance of power between these married writers remains precarious. There might be a fascinating play here, but the amorphous scenes that Hyland provides lack a dramatic through line.

As the play flounders, director Jo Bonney casts about for solutions. A playful ghost story that has Sylvia entering and exiting through the refrigerator takes a bloody turn. As Sally spirals, the set turns crimson. This detour into horror is only temporary, but there’s no clear destination in sight.

The unstoppable force of Sally’s resentment and the immovable object of Theo’s perseverance are not an ideal dramatic combination. Francis bravely doesn’t soften Sally’s prickly nature, but she doesn’t give us much reason to sympathize with her character either. Keyishian’s gentle Theo is so solicitous that Sally’s abrasiveness begins to feel abusive, not to say theatrically off-putting. Perhaps that too is intentional. But just as there’s a difference between depicting chaos and depicting chaotically, there’s a difference between presenting theatergoers with a realistic image of mental illness and driving an audience nuts.

Ted is a cartoon creep with an Oxbridge hauteur, but Theo’s shortcomings may be too subtly rendered for a play that cries out for more definition. (Even his betrayal, involving the use of private marital material for literary purposes, seems equivocal.)

Hyland can’t resolve her shapeless play, so she has Sally talk her way into the future in a rambling monologue that’s a complete cop-out.

Sylvia warned Sally that if she tried to write about her, she would do everything in her power to stop her. The ghost of Plath, however, has nothing to worry about. “Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia” conks out on its own.

The word “desert” suggests barrenness for many, but anyone who lives in or near one knows how rich, wild and complex it can be. That’s equally true of the best books set there. The winter months are the best time to travel to the desert — but tucking into one of these titles is timeless, of course. Here is a brief selection of some of the best desert reads, old and new, that put the Southwest at their center. Whether you’re planning a road trip or reading from the comfort of home, get a glimpse of awe-inspiring vistas, rugged wildlife, tales of resilience and more.

“The Land of Little Rain”
By Mary Austin
Penguin Classics: 128 pp., $17
(1903; reprint 1997)

Arguably the first collection of lyrical essay writing about the California desert, Austin drew on her travels through the Owens Valley and environs, covering mining, the Shoshone tribe, weather and water. The book is thrilling in Austin’s close attention to details, from the grasses to rivers and hard-trod trails. Here, she writes, “it is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood and delicate joys.”

“Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness”
By Edward Abbey
Ballantine Books: 352 pp., $10
(1968; reprinted 1985)

Chronicling his stint in Utah’s Arches National Park in the late ‘50s, Abbey’s bestselling memoir revealed the beauty and fragility of the Southwest to a wider American audience, depicting the punishing weather and awe-inspiring vistas while thundering against the masses of lookie-loos driving into the desert only to despoil it. It’s often likened to “Walden,” but Abbey’s flinty, darkly humorous voice gave Western literature a tone distinct from East Coast gentility and folksy cowboy writing.

“Desert Oracle, Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest”
By Ken Layne
Picador: 304 pp., $20
(2021)

Part handbook, part folklore collection, part tribute to the Southwest, Layne’s entertaining chronicle is built on brief chapters about the outlaws, writers, singers and other characters who define the region’s hardy reputation, from the path of Western swing musicians from Texas to L.A. to UFO conspiracists who convene in New Mexico, the Manson family’s trek to Death Valley, and beyond.

“The Deserts of California: A California Field Atlas”
By Obi Kaufmann
Heyday, 576 pp., $55
(2023)

Kaufmann’s lavishly illustrated field guide to the state’s arid regions is wide-ranging both geographically (from the Great Basin to the north and the Sonoran and Mojave to the south) and in terms of the species covered, from bats to bobcats and chias to palo verdes. It’s built for both the backpack and end table, with detailed descriptions alongside pleas for the land’s preservation.

“Mecca”
By Susan Straight
V: 384, $19
(2022)

A contemporary epic set in the Imperial Valley, Straight’s novel is a cross-section of desert denizens — a motorcycle officer, a Palm Springs spa employee, a family rocked by a police shooting — set against the demands of desert life. Encompassing COVID-19 and wildfires, it speaks to the present while exploring the region’s long history.

“Mojave Ghost”
By Forrest Gander
New Directions, 80 pp., $16
(2024)

“In this xeric topography / we fold ourselves into the circumstance of desert foothills / chewed away by leprosies, toothed winds, and / sudden rains,” writes the Pulitzer-winning poet Forrest Gander in this book-length poem about his hike across the 800 miles of the San Andreas Fault after the deaths of his wife, poet C.D. Wright, and mother. Though the writing is informed by the starkness of the landscape, he writes beautifully about the desert’s healing powers.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”