Writers

Malibu novelist Brian Moore has sketched the face of evil, and it is a tired old man with bad teeth. What's more, the old man lives. Or he did until recently. In his 18th novel, "The Statement" (Dutton, 1996), Moore gives us Pierre Broussard, a geriatric Nazi whose enemies, after decades on the chase, are finally getting close.

It is the quirky subcultures and out-there personalities of Southern California that have long ignited Robert Ferrigno's writing. Steroid-pumped bodybuilders. Ferrari owners. Auto repo men. Surf bums. Women who compete in bar bikini contests. "I was always interested in subcultures--high or low, it didn't matter," says Ferrigno, 49, who in the 1980s was an Orange County newspaper features writer.

In Los Angeles there are two stellar reduction techniques, one for the body, the other for the mind. If you're fat, there's UCLA's Obesity Center, where they'll hand you a prescription for fen-phen. For those with overweight egos, there's a job as a Hollywood assistant, where they'll hand you your head if you can't find a phone number immediately, have the walnut gearshift knob for the Ferrari delivered instantly, and the dry-cleaning back quicker than an agent can flick a Rolodex.

With a nearly shaven head, jet-black horn rims, impressively coiffed hair jutting from the sides of his ears, and the obligatory tattoo that slinks up his gym-toned left arm, uncoiling slowly into something elaborate at the top of the shoulder blade, Bruce Wagner could easily slip into his fictional world. He'd be the creepy, brooding writer, no doubt pretentious, who cranks out Hollywood tripe and pawns it off as art. Of course, you can only speculate about his tacky and sordid personal habits.

Robert Seidman had never worked for a newspaper or magazine or gone to journalism school, and the jobs he held at Sprint and MCI and IBM certainly had nothing to do with writing. But Seidman had a calling, so several years ago he began sending out a weekly dispatch, via e-mail, called "In, Around, and Online."

Daytime talk shows make dysfunctional families seem like the norm, but Teri Harrison has a different story. "I had the perfect upbringing," said Harrison, 33, a self-employed businesswoman. "There was a lot of love, there was a lot of support, there was a lot of fun." Harrison and her husband, Martin, looked forward to duplicating that upbringing with a family of their own.

As promotions go, this one was a slam dunk. Take retired Laker great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, sit his towering self in a chair to bring him down to eye level with mere mortals, and invite folks to have their photo taken with him. Watch the line form. For two hours over the weekend, Abdul-Jabbar smiled alongside visitor after visitor to the American Booksellers Assn.'s annual convention and trade show to help promote his book, "Black Profiles in Courage," which William Morrow & Co.

Two months after his novel "Independence Day" became the first book ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN / Faulkner Award, Richard Ford sits in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, appearing relaxed but focused, his ice-gray eyes piercing and clear. Wearing a black open-necked sports shirt and white bucks with no socks, he occupies a large wing chair, from which he occasionally leans forward to make a point.

Tina Rosenberg is a good person. She's prompt and neat and cheerful and direct. She's not afraid to wear the same outfit two days in a row. She reads the foreign affairs parts of the newspaper, the parts that less-good people barely skim. She's won a MacArthur and a National Book Award and, this spring, the Pulitzer for nonfiction, and she's been genuinely flabbergasted each time. She dates a human rights lawyer. She favors translucent sunglasses over the shifty, mirrored kind.

When PEN Center USA West informed George Cothran that his story in the San Francisco Weekly had won its 1996 Literary Award for Journalism, Cothran knew he was excited but not really why. "To be honest, PEN is an entity I had only a vague awareness of," said Cothran, whose story headlined "Shut Up, Little Man" traced how the drunken bickering of two aging roommates inspired an international cult following. "So I had to formulate my own sense of how important this is.