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| Letters To Malone |
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Updated Bi-weekly
**If you wish to write to Mr Malone, you may do so by
sending an email to Thermopylae_Hillston@hotmail.com.**
Dear Mr. Malone,
I've been hooked on your books since picking up a copy of Handling Sin years ago. I love the social commentary you so brilliantly infuse in your extraordinary stories. I particularly love and appreciate the inclusion of interracial couples...it's so refreshing.
Time's Witness is my favorite and I can hardly wait for First Lady. Cuddy is the man of my dreams. Is he based on a real person? If so, is he available and how can I get in touch with him?
Thanks a million and keep up the good work.
An adoring fan,
Fern Schneiderman
Dear Fern Schneiderman,
First, my heavens, thank you! Yours is the kind of letter that keeps writers writing and I'm most grateful for your long faith in my fiction.
First Lady is being published September 17. Naturally I'm hoping you will pick up Cuddy Mangum on that date, and so will all your friends and relatives.
By the way, Cuddy certainly does thank you for wanting his phone number. As you know, he's always felt a little jealous of his partner Justin Savile's good looks and way with women. I've been fascinated over the years by the two very distinct groups of female readers--Cuddy fans and Justin fans. (My wife is a Cuddy fan.) As for his reality, he's as real as I could make him. But I regret to tell you that while it's easy to reach him (you just have to go to Hillston, North Carolina, to the top of the Cadmean Building where he runs the police department, or to River Rise Condos where he still lives with his old poodle Martha Mitchell), both those places can only be traveled to in fiction.
Happily my new publisher (Sourcebooks LANDMARK) is re-releasing my backlist (earlier works). In the fall, along with First Lady, they'll bring out Handling Sin and Uncivil Seasons. (If you haven't read it, Uncivil Seasons is the first of the Hillston novels; it's narrated by Justin but he can rarely get Cuddy to stop talking.) In the spring, along with a collection of my short stories, they'll re-issue Time's Witness and Foolscap. On a serious note, about racial issues in my novels, I think that at the deep heart of America (its heart of darkness) lies the long painful history of slavery and the relations between blacks and whites bred of that horror. Therefore that struggle is the deepest subject in the mainstream of American fiction from Twain's Huck Finn to Toni Morrison's Beloved, which is why so much of our fiction has been written by Southern writers--from Poe to Harper Lee and so many others, both black and white.)
Again many thanks for your kind enthusiasm.
Cordially,
Michael Malone
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