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"Once every few years a novel will fill me with an almost magical joy...Everything in Spencer's latest book--his slightly surreal plot, stunningly drawn protagonist, and brilliant use of language--produces in me that feeling of deep personal gratification. Men in Black is narrated, for the most part, by Sam Holland, a literary novelist with a sideline of writing quickie, pseudonymous books ("An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Pro Football," "Traveling With Your Pet") to pay the bills. When Holland writes "Visitors from Above" no one suspects that this is largely made-up primer on UFOs will become an enormous bestseller. At bottom, Men in Black is the story of one man trying to tell the truth, but it is also the story of a marriage, an angry kid, media hype, and a country whose identity has become hopelessly fractured...Profound ideas are interwoven with a story that is not only thoroughly engrossing, but very funny as well." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
To pay the bills, Sam Holland wrote "Visitors from Above"--a quickie book on UFOs seasoned with sensationalism. He never expected it to become a smash bestseller, and now that his teenage son has run away, his marriage is deteriorating, and his publisher is planning a publicity tour, Sam is beginning to wish he could return to the restless obscurity he once enjoyed.
Less fortunately for Spencer, Endless Love also attracted the attention of Franco Zeffirelli, who directed a disastrous Brooke Shields vehicle based on the book (the 1981 movie periodically turns up on critics' lists of the worst movies of all time). But while Endless Love was, as Jonathan Lethem opined in Salon, a good book overshadowed by a bad movie, Spencer's next novel, about a political candidate haunted by the memory of his late fiancée, got an actual boost from Hollywood. After Keith Gordon filmed Waking the Dead in 1999 with Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly in the lead roles, the book was reissued, gaining thousands of new readers. As Spencer notes in an interview on his publisher's web site, "The best thing about having a movie made of your novel is that more people read the book."
Spencer published several books between the first edition of Waking the Dead and its reissue, including Men in Black, the tale of a literary novelist whose pseudonymous hackwork earns him sudden fame and fortune, and The Rich Man's Table, the fictional memoir of a Dylan-like folk singer's illegitimate son. The Los Angeles Times Book Review called Men in Black "the Cadillac of novels -- every word vibrating with a kind of shameless big-boned American grace."
With his recent novel A Ship Made of Paper, Spencer returns to his earlier themes: romantic obsession and overpowering desire. "What makes this brave, dazzling novel so impossible to put down is the urgency with which it makes you care about what happens to its characters: male and female, black and white, young and old," wrote Francine Prose. "Scott Spencer has a genius for observing dramatic everyday moments when the self crashes into the barriers of class and race and culture, together with infinite compassion for the wayward impulse that turns human beings into fanatics willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of romantic love."
Critics have credited Spencer with an ambitious prose style and a keen grasp of contemporary culture, but what distinguishes his work most is his ability to tap into the intense currents of emotion beneath the surface of domestic life. As New York magazine noted, "In a literary age marked by cool, cerebral fiction, Spencer writes from the heart."
Spencer has taught fiction writing at Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire, The Nation, GQ, and Rolling Stone, among other publications.
The film version of Endless Love, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, was (as TV Guide put it) "a notorious disaster," but it marked the film debut of three future stars: Tom Cruise, James Spader, and Jami Gertz. The movie's theme song won Lionel Ritchie an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.
A Ship Made of Paper is the fourth novel of Spencer's that uses Leyden, New York as a backdrop.
Overview
"Once every few years a novel will fill me with an almost magical joy...Everything in Spencer's latest book--his slightly surreal plot, stunningly drawn protagonist, and brilliant use of language--produces in me that feeling of deep personal gratification. Men in Black is narrated, for the most part, by Sam Holland, a literary novelist with a sideline of writing quickie, pseudonymous books ("An Intelligent ...