Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 53

BOOKS TIMES SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 2000 5D Interviews Edited by Erik Bledsoe GREAT BEGINNINGS There is bad luck, and then there is bad luck: luck so bad it borders on the luck so bad it throws its recipients into a convulsive laughter from which they cannot escape, luck so bad that words and language fail, us and the breath escapes our bodies noisily and unordered." i Opening line of Luck, by Eric -Martin, due out this month from -i Norton ($23.95) I MARGO HAMMOND BOOK EDITOR BOOK TALK Which of these titles do you think was published by a university press? a. Kick Ass by Carl Hiaasen b. Casanova Was a Book Lover And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities About the Writing, Selling and Reading of Books by John MaxweD Hamilton c. Getting Naked With Harry Crews by Erik Bledsoe The answer? AH of the above. Long known for publishing heavily footnoted tomes written in academese on "very important topics," the once stodgy university presses obviously are getting hipper.

Esoteric fare such as On the Purity of Logic by Walter Burley, the first complete English translation of a handbook of logic written in Latin by a 14th century English philosopher (coming out from Yale University Press mis fall) still prevail. But more and more titles with greater mass-appeal, including coffee table books, collections of journalists' columns and even cookbooks, are cropping up on university press lists. And they are being read by more than just a roomful of professors. Even the more scholarly books offered by these campus-bound presses often are being packaged for maximum commercial impact This week Columbia University, for example, is publishing a feminist dissection of the Starr Report, the document that almost brought down a president Its titillating title? The Starr Report Disrobed (see review below). The all-time bestselling tide at the University Press of Florida still is a classic classroom textbook: Critical Theory Since 1965 by Hazard Adams.

But lately the Gainesville-based press has been finding success with far less stuffy titles. Since its publication in 1995, The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook by Adela Hernandez Gonzmart has sold 20,000 copies for the press, a huge success for most campus presses. Getting Naked With Harry Crews, an anthology of interviews with the popular Florida author, and Kick Ass, a collection of Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen's newspaper articles, both published at the end of last year, are not far behind. In May Louisiana State University Press, the publisher of the Casanova book on our list published Still Waters, a collection of photographs by C.C. found a natural home at the Ohio University Press for his series set amid the Old Order Amish sects in Holmes County, Ohio, says press director David Sanders.

The series makes the world of the Ohio Amish accessible to people in a way a scholarly treatment can't says Sanders. The first book, Blood of the Prodigal, was launched last year with a state-wide author tour, a marketing effort that paid off in sales. The second, Broken English, published this year, went into a second printing even before its official publication date. Publishing nearly 9.000 books a year or roughly 17 percent of all VS. books, the 120 or so university presses have long been subsidized by their parent organizations.

But by venturing into general interest as well as regional titles, they are becoming profitable businesses that no longer have to rely on the largesse of the universities that spawned them. That is making them not only more daring but more fun. "With a successful program, we are funding our own growth," says Meredith Morris-Babb, editor-in-chief of the University Press of Florida, although she adds modestly, "We don't consider ourselves a national trade house yet" Such lofty aspirations are not so farfetched though. University presses have been known to hit the national jackpot Twenty years ago Louisiana State University Press took a chance on a novel brought to its of fices by the mother of an author who had committed suicide 11 years earlier at the age of 32. The manuscript had been rejected by a slew of other publishers, including Simon Schuster.

It was a lucky move for LSU press. John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces went on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and sell 1.5-million copies worldwide. The novel, featuring the pompous and overweight Ignatius who lives with his mother in New Orleans, still sells 50,000 copies each year for LSU press. This year the press is celebrating the hardcover edition's 20th anniversary with a new edition, featuring an introduction by National Public Radio commentator and author Andrei Codrescu who supplies a new introduction to go along with Walker Percy's original foreword. And there's not a footnote in sight J.

mmm 1 1 Lockwood. Although Lockwood is based in Baton Rouge, his stunning color photographs of flora and fauna across the globe have a national audience. Still Waters, a retrospective of Lockwood's work, collects "the best 100" in a lavishly produced oversize volume. Journalists, who are not exactly big on footnotes, are suddenly proving popular at university presses. The University Press of Florida is preparing a collection of columns by feisty St.

Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell for next fall's list The University of Alabama Press has just published Somebody Told Me, the often pioving newspaper stories of Rick Bragg, a former St. Petersburg Times reporter who is now Miami bureau chief for the New York Times. Howell Raines, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, is a featured writer in The Crimson Tide: An Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama by Winston Groom of Forrest Gump fame, due out next month from the University of Alabama Press. Other contributors are announcer Keith Jackson and authors Gay Talese and the late Willie Morris. Meanwhile in October the Texas University Press will be publishing Finding Celia's Place, a memoir by Willie Morris' first wife, a feminist activist who previously has published with Little Brown and Scribner.

And the Alabama press is reissuing Raines' debut novel, Whiskey Man, about a boy in Depression-era Alabama More and more fiction writers, particularly mid-list authors abandoned by the bigger publishers, are finding a welcome mat at university presses. Ohio University Press has even started its own mystery series. Striking out with commercial publishers, PL Gaus, a chemistry professor at the College of Wooster, -Oh WRITING SECRETS: Cheryl Anne 1 Porter (author of Prairie Song) describes the life of a writer and how she broke into the publishing world; 7 p.m. Thursday, Barnes Noble, 213 Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa. AUTHOR APPEARANCES: Mildred Harding (Waking Up in Egypt), 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, Borders Books and Music, Tyrone Square Mall, St Petersburg. Vee Williams Garcia (Forbidden Circles), 7 p.m. Thursday, Inkwood Books, 216 Armenia Tampa. Jeff Alt (A Walk for Sunshine), 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Barnes Noble, 11802 Dale Mabry Highway, Carrollwood.

Dr. Beverly Grottkau (Till Divorce Do Us Part) with Eva Rumpf 7 pm. Friday, Barnes Noble, Brandon Town Center, 'j Brandon, and 3 p.m. Saturday, Barnes 1 Noble, 23654 U.S. 19 Clearwater.

Tim Dorsey (Hammerhead Ranch Motet), noon Saturday, Barnes Noble, 213, Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa. Bill Murphy (One Tank Trips), 1 p.m. Saturday, Books-A-Million, 33550 U.S. 19 Palm Harbor. i Cherrie Cumbie (Christo and Coco Adventures Series), 2 p.m.

Saturday, Barnes Noble, Carrollwood. Still Waters University publishing is finding a new demand in books that are not very academic. These appeal to a hipper group of readers. c. feminists dissect the Clinton sen scandal That Bill and Monica never engaged in sexual intercourse, Malti-Douglas takes as a positive sign of the president" hidden strength.

"Clinton kept Lewinsky out of his private quarters," she writes. Nor does he give in to her desire for sexual intercourse. Here she even quotes the Starr Report as evidence: Clinton "responded that he could not do so because of the possible consequences. The two of them argued, and he asked if he should stop calling her. No, she responded." Just in case you missed the point the author explains: The male seems to be the completer passive object His desires are not articulated, nor is he even asked about them." Historians take note: The president of the United States was set up and seduced in a vicious plot Clinton may not be off the hook yet But with apologists like this hard at work, it won't belong.

Bill Thomas is the author of Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill and other books. The Report," she declares, "clearly feels obligated to amass an enormous amount of data relating to (Clinton-Lewinsky sexual encounters and feed them to the unsuspecting reader." I thought prosecutors were supposed to amass data? And what reader who lived in this country as the scandal unfolded could ever be called unsuspecting? But ifs when Malti-Douglas probes Starr's attack on what she calls Bui and Hillary's "heterosexual marriage" that things get really interesting. The problem for Starr, as die author sees it is Hillary's frequent absence from the White House. Every time she goes on a trip, it seems, Bill and Monica rendezvous in the Oval Office. "Is the reader to surmise that Mrs.

Clinton's travels are what set the events in motion?" she asks. The moral is clean a wife should be by her husband's side. In the sexual-moral world of the Starr Report, the liberat-ed-woman First Lady has her share of responsibility in the affair." Reviewed by BILL THOMAS Once Richard Nixon was Washington's greatest gift to psycho-historians: the Checkers Speech, the White House tapes, the goodbye to his staff. Could anything possibly be more compellingly weird than the inner workings of Tricky Dick? For over a quarter century the answer to that question was an unqualified, "No." But not any more. Now there's Bill Clinton.

And if you think you've heard everything about Bill, Hillary and the whole cast of characters who make up the Clinton years, think again. The recent boomlet of books on the Clintons and company is nothing compared to what well be getting when the administration is history and ex-insiders start lining up to come clean. If tempting to say: "Slick Willie, we hardly knew ye." But thanks to the revelations produced by Clinton's hots for Monica Lewinsky, there's a lot we know already. Which might normally make The Starr Report Disrobed must-reading for anyone who likes his or her high-level sleaze based on aca- THE STARR REPORT DISROBED By Fedwa Malti-Douglas Columbia University Press, $39.50 demic research. The problem is that academic research tends to make everything it touches unbearably boring, the Starr Report is one of the most entertaining official documents in American history, but in Fedwa Malti-Douglas' feminist deconstruction, it becomes merely a way of exposing the "vast right-wing conspiracy" responsible for de-pantsing the president (Professor Malti-Douglas, it should be mentioned, teaches gender studies at the University of Indiana) If you buy the author's premise that Starr's investigation of Clinton was a conservative witch hunt motivated largely by sexual repression and anti-feminism, youll probably accept her conclusions.

If you don't just about everything she says about Starr will make you wonder. CROSSWORD Chocoholic's delight No. 0813 By NANCY SALOMON and HARVEY ESTES Edited by Will Shortz UkTo" JTaU L. DBt I IN It I ll I I I 1 AVIa I 1 0 1 I (Y 6 A I ft 1 15 hug 6 6 mH 0 iNlfl I TTTT HI 1H A UfTBT 0 TlfD 0 ipfs A I HQl I 0 L' lUlH I INT A I frlGTU Ttt'd'i 56 Actress Farrow 57 Landing 58 Game-stopping call 59 Characters in fables, usually 60 Scuff 62 Low spot of land 63 Faced a new day 65 Gotcha! 66 Dundee citizen 67 The lightning bolt on Harry Potter's forehead, e.g. 68 Similar IMBIEIHI I BkACKWALLNIOITIbSriSKEINS 1 1 hH hi A I A A II 6 IN IE saish aHa i i IuinIeioIuit 2 0 TT A tfffc" unc eT ft TTTUTTp11TT OUT a 77 Solution to the Aug.

13 puzzle, 50 Statistician's margin for error 52 Standing rule 53 Savoie sovereign 54 Lao- 55 Pianist Schnabel 56 Drink with a kick 58 Blotto 60 The Switchblade Kid of cinema 61 Secures under cover, with "in" 62 Big Band music 64 Walton League (conservation group) 66 Skedaddles 67 Wise guy 68 Clamorous 70 Hummable, perhaps 73 Facial foundation 75 Chest-thumping 76 High-tech co. 79 Draft choice 80 Not quite right 81 Rites of passage ACROSS 1 Band aid 7 Robot" author 13 Tasters testers 20 Higher ground 21 Couch, in a way 22 Beach in a 1964 hit song 23 Nice people collect them 25 It may be flared 26 In the limelight author 28 Business graphics 30 Out of chains 32 Change a bill, say 34 Dwelling in Durango 35 Like some Riesling wines 38 Great balls of fire 39 Kimono closer 41 Sultanate citizen 42 Beat to a pulp 45 Sound system component 1 5 IS I 7 It 9 110 111 12 flU 114 1 15 1 16 117 118 119 24 25 26 27 29 30 it JJ- 33 34 33 36 37 34 "1 39 40 4t 42 43 44 46 47 1 48 49 "S1 53 54 55 1 56 57 I 54 159 60 61 62 63 1 6T65 '66 "1 67 69 169 70 71 72 73 74 "1 75 7t 177 1 79 gj gJ 65 96 5 5 92 93 94 95 96 "7 97 96 100 101 "1 HH- 103 T5T 105 1 106 1 107 109 TbT" no 112 TT5 7i4 TTi 6 Paper worker 7 Mac maker 8 Did a smith's job 9 Place for a pupil 10 Tiger, for one 11 East of Essen 12 Evening bell 13 Long in the past? 14 Part of the Bible: Abbr. 15 Punishment unit 16 Last "course" of a spicy meal? 17 Earth, in sci-fi 18 Sends out 19 Chili topper 24 Gull 29 Hot 31 Comic strip dog 33 More than sore 35 Yielding 36 Modem farm birds 37 Whipped up 38 Toots in a restaurant 39 Common name for hydrous silica 40 Entrance 43Entr 44 Book-cracking 46 Treble clef singer 47 Issue suddenly 48 Roasts, e.g. 49 White wine aperitifs 51 Adder's threat 52 Valuable plastic 84 Suggestive 86 "Absalom and Achitophel" poet 87 The Pearl Fishers composer 88 Service arm: Abbr. 89 Spring shower, possibly? 91 Woodstock band, 1969 93 Dropdown? 96 Sink hole .97 Flimflam 99 Some approaches on the links 102 Sweets 104Lang, Superboy's girlfriend 108 Alternative fuel 109 Claim in a collectibles ad 112 Sign of a goof 113 Siberians' relatives 114 In a weakened state 115 Section of London 116 Not in any way 117 Drives back DOWN lHick 2 Word after "Ole" 3 Cream ingredient 4 Slow An online puzzle Take the Web crossword challenge.

Look for our daily interactive puzzle on the St Petersburg Times Web site at http:www.sptimes.com. You'll need a Java-enabled browser to play. 69 Computer command 71 1 spot 72 Bad trait for a politician 74 Grace's end 75 Spark for the Giants' 1951 pennant win 76 Biblical site of the temple of Dagon 77 Story connector 81 Hot off the press 82 Letter-shaped construction piece 83 Bygone car option 85 Distant settlement 86 Mid-6th-century date 90 Southern Australia explorer 92 Obedient one 93 Fibber Of note 94 Kim of Rudyard 103 Pins' place Kipling's "Kim" 95KudrowandBonet 105 Glorified ofer 96 Meted (out) 106 Present time 97 Rumor squelchers Ad(fcd 5tipuUlionJ 98 Originated 100 Cage co-star in 110 rorking-liavingLas Vegas" Stumped? Call 1 (900) 420-5656 Answers to any three clues 95? peininute 111 Wrath 101 Phone, slangily.