Rick Moody

How does an author of seriously literary fiction discover one of his books was owned by Bernie Madoff, the investor who defrauded his clients of billions of dollars? He sees it listed in an auction on EBay. That's how Rick Moody came to know that Madoff's library included his novel "Purple America . " Parts of the Madoff library collection is appearing piecemeal on eBay from a seller who won the books (Lots 750, 751 and 752) in a U.S. Marshall's auction of some of Madoff's Florida possessions.

Join book critic David L. Ulin and me for a video chat about the books we're looking forward to in 2013. We'll be talking live Tuesday at 10 a.m. In part, the conversation will preview my article in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, which looks at the hot titles for the first half of the year. I've talked to booksellers about what they're anticipating, and there's not a lot of consensus. That's not to say there isn't a lot of enthusiasm -- there's plenty -- but it's for a wide swath of titles.

The Four Fingers of Death A Novel Rick Moody Little, Brown: 730 pp., $25.99 Rick Moody grew up on a nutritious diet of Pynchon, Vonnegut (to whom this book is dedicated), Roth and Updike, some Melville and Hawthorne for New England-style moralizing, a pinch of Carlos Castaneda for spice and a good helping of the Bible (comfort food, the cassava of Western culture). He has described — in four previous novels, two story collections, a collection of novellas and a memoir — exactly what it might be like to grow up on planet Earth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: broken promises, broken relationships, great hopes for technology and the quickening devastation of beauty.

How does an author of seriously literary fiction discover one of his books was owned by Bernie Madoff, the investor who defrauded his clients of billions of dollars? He sees it listed in an auction on EBay. That's how Rick Moody came to know that Madoff's library included his novel "Purple America . " Parts of the Madoff library collection is appearing piecemeal on eBay from a seller who won the books (Lots 750, 751 and 752) in a U.S. Marshall's auction of some of Madoff's Florida possessions.

FAMILY Walking With Dinosaurs The award-winning BBC TV series comes to life in this scaly theatrical event. Fifteen life-size animatronic dinosaurs, including the terror of the ancient terrain, Tyrannosaurus rex , fight for survival and supremacy in a spectacle that melds science and entertainment. Honda Center, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim. 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. and 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 5 p.m. Sunday. (714) 704-2500. http://www.dinosaurlive.

The world is awash in blood, not the blood of war or civil strife but the blood of writers eager to tell the story of their lives. Incest, poverty, discrimination, death, disease, depression and addiction are worthy subjects, but confession comes too easy nowadays, and memoir too often an excuse to open the floodgates of the artistic life.

To be fair, it is not highly professional to tell a tired writer on a book tour that you think he has a nice face. Some people might think you are, how do you say, "coming on to them." But like a lot of Rick Moody's readers, I feel like I know him (every author's worst nightmare). He has become, for a generation of people in their 30s and 40s, a dark chronicler of American suburbia--mostly the East Coast variety, but it translates.

If Rick Moody were an innkeeper instead of a story writer, his guests would admire the striking decor of the rooms but be less pleased, perhaps, at finding Moody lying in the bed. The title novella and many of the stories in "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven" have both a surface and an expressive brilliance, purposefully undermined and distressed in various up-to-date literary ways.

Join book critic David L. Ulin and me for a video chat about the books we're looking forward to in 2013. We'll be talking live Tuesday at 10 a.m. In part, the conversation will preview my article in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, which looks at the hot titles for the first half of the year. I've talked to booksellers about what they're anticipating, and there's not a lot of consensus. That's not to say there isn't a lot of enthusiasm -- there's plenty -- but it's for a wide swath of titles.

THERE'S a pun in the title of Rick Moody's audacious and uneven eighth book, "Right Livelihoods," but whether it's the thugs' hoods or the 'hoods they inhabit that are right lively is up for grabs. What's unmistakable in this trio of novellas is Moody's obsession with meaning and misunderstanding, and the netherworlds in between. The trilogy opens with "The Omega Force," a post-Sept. 11 farce about a blowhard whose fall off the wagon makes him see evil-doers lurking in every shadow. Dr.

FAMILY Walking With Dinosaurs The award-winning BBC TV series comes to life in this scaly theatrical event. Fifteen life-size animatronic dinosaurs, including the terror of the ancient terrain, Tyrannosaurus rex , fight for survival and supremacy in a spectacle that melds science and entertainment. Honda Center, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim. 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. and 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 5 p.m. Sunday. (714) 704-2500. http://www.dinosaurlive.

The Four Fingers of Death A Novel Rick Moody Little, Brown: 730 pp., $25.99 Rick Moody grew up on a nutritious diet of Pynchon, Vonnegut (to whom this book is dedicated), Roth and Updike, some Melville and Hawthorne for New England-style moralizing, a pinch of Carlos Castaneda for spice and a good helping of the Bible (comfort food, the cassava of Western culture). He has described — in four previous novels, two story collections, a collection of novellas and a memoir — exactly what it might be like to grow up on planet Earth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: broken promises, broken relationships, great hopes for technology and the quickening devastation of beauty.

THERE'S a pun in the title of Rick Moody's audacious and uneven eighth book, "Right Livelihoods," but whether it's the thugs' hoods or the 'hoods they inhabit that are right lively is up for grabs. What's unmistakable in this trio of novellas is Moody's obsession with meaning and misunderstanding, and the netherworlds in between. The trilogy opens with "The Omega Force," a post-Sept. 11 farce about a blowhard whose fall off the wagon makes him see evil-doers lurking in every shadow. Dr.

Ambitious. Audacious. That's Rick Moody's new novel, "The Diviners," the exuberant tale of a proposed miniseries called "The Diviners" that exists in concept only, yet spins the wheel of fortune for a cast of dozens. "The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles," Moody writes in the opening sentence of the prologue, titled "Opening Credits and Theme Music."

The world is awash in blood, not the blood of war or civil strife but the blood of writers eager to tell the story of their lives. Incest, poverty, discrimination, death, disease, depression and addiction are worthy subjects, but confession comes too easy nowadays, and memoir too often an excuse to open the floodgates of the artistic life.

To be fair, it is not highly professional to tell a tired writer on a book tour that you think he has a nice face. Some people might think you are, how do you say, "coming on to them." But like a lot of Rick Moody's readers, I feel like I know him (every author's worst nightmare). He has become, for a generation of people in their 30s and 40s, a dark chronicler of American suburbia--mostly the East Coast variety, but it translates.

This is not so much a novel as an excavation--of that nearly but not quite extinct entity the nuclear family as it was in those dark ages, the 1970s. The argot, the foibles, the fads and the artifacts: They're all here, meticulously catalogued and historically framed with discussions of the design, politics and groping psychology of the period. In the midst of this exactingly reconstructed rubble we find the Hoods, a family of four.

Ambitious. Audacious. That's Rick Moody's new novel, "The Diviners," the exuberant tale of a proposed miniseries called "The Diviners" that exists in concept only, yet spins the wheel of fortune for a cast of dozens. "The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles," Moody writes in the opening sentence of the prologue, titled "Opening Credits and Theme Music."

If Rick Moody were an innkeeper instead of a story writer, his guests would admire the striking decor of the rooms but be less pleased, perhaps, at finding Moody lying in the bed. The title novella and many of the stories in "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven" have both a surface and an expressive brilliance, purposefully undermined and distressed in various up-to-date literary ways.