American Society of Authors and Writers

A compendium of news about ourselves and others of our own ilk. To include updates on your own literary events and achievements, please use the form below.

Catching Up with Tess

You would certainly never know it to look at the beautiful and talented Tess Gerritsen, but she routinely spends time with a deranged serial killer. At least that's what the doctor-turned-bestselling-novelist did for her latest novel, The Surgeon (Ballantine), a gripping tale of a brilliant female doctor who is stalked by a surgeon who just happens to be a serial killer operating on his female patients while they are still alive.

Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, she went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and was awarded her M.D. in 1979. After completing her internal medicine residency, Gerritsen worked as a physician in Honolulu, Hawaii. While on maternity leave, she began writing fiction. On a whim, she submitted a literary short story to a statewide fiction contest sponsored by Honolulu Magazine. She won first place.

In 1987, Gerritsen's first novel was published. Call after Midnight, a romantic thriller, was soon followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, "Adrift," that aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week ,starring Kate Jackson.

It was a chance dinner conversation that inspired Gerritsen to write her first medical thriller. The man sitting beside her at the restaurant was an ex-cop who ran a security service protecting American businessmen in Russia. On his last trip abroad, Moscow cops had told him that Russian orphans were vanishing from the streets. They believed the children were being kidnaped by the Russian mafia and shipped abroad as organ donors.

The story so horrified Gerritsen that she immediately called her brother-in-law, a reporter for Newsweek, suggesting that he investigate. Although the magazine was unable to confirm, Gerritsen couldn't forget those missing Russian orphans. They became the inspiration for the plot of her first medical thriller, Harvest.

Harvest was released in hardcover in 1996 and marked the author's debut on the New York Times' bestseller list. Film rights were sold to Paramount/Dreamworks, and the book was translated into twenty foreign languages.

Since then, Gerritsen has written several other medical thrillers. Critics around the world have praised her novels as "pulse-pounding fun," "weirdly terrific stuff with a steel grip," and "scary and brilliant."

Now retired from medicine, Gerritsen writes full time. She and her family live in Maine. In her free time she enjoys gardening and playing the fiddle.

A Tale of Survival

Ruth Kluger, like Anne Frank, was there during the Holocaust. And, like Frank, she recorded her memories in a book. Check out this review by Washington Post writer Jonathan Yardley.

Afghanistan, Terrorism, and the Future

It's one thing for a widely published author to produce new works of popular fiction centering around the Taliban and the fight for justice and freedom. It's another for that same author to write a series of non-fiction books on the same subject for children. Yet, that's exactly what best-selling popular author D. J. Herda is doing.

Feeling the need to help our youth to understand the tragic implications of the September 11 attack and its complicated aftermath, Herda is currently negotiating with three different juvenile-book publishers to produce a series of books that will help children understand exactly what it is that fuels the hatred of westerners within Islamic fanatics ... and how that hatred is being manifested. In an exclusive interview with ASAW, Herda talked of the importance

of educating our young, even while offering adult-level entertainment for their parents.

"I've never really looked at writing for children as a lesser art form than writing for adults," the author said. "To me, writing is writing. If my own psyche demands that I generate fiction for the adult trade market, my desire to communicate an understanding of some very complex issues to our youth dictates that I take time to share with them my expertise in the field."

But doesn't the author worry that he might get typecast as a children's-book author to the detriment of his adult trade-book sales?

"I don't worry about that at all," he admitted. "Not everyone can be--or should be--pigeon-holed into one or two categories. To me, there's no greater satisfaction than being able to write in different literary genres for different audiences, whether adult or juvenile. And that's exactly what keeps me cranking out the books."

Piece of the Rock

The publication of Kanan Makiya's wildly creative book, The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem, is even more. In light of the West's rush to understand the foibles and truths of Islam, this book proves to be both timely and beneficial. Although these virtues may well have been unintended, Makiya offers fresh insight into why so many Muslims find Jewish practices in the Middle East so incendiary.

The Rock, in this case, refers to the holy, precious stone beneath the most prominent landmark of Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock. Makiya, an Iraqi by birth, an architect by training and a Brandeis University professor of Middle East Studies by practice, has set out to make sense of this mystical place, about which the same legends are often told with a different slant by Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

The results of years of research, The Rock is a solid, interesting, and highly illuminating book sure to offer more answers than questions. And that's exactly what the non-Muslim world needs in the wake of the turmoil of terrorism past ... and, unfortunately, terrorism yet to come.

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