Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 79

WHAT I'M READING 7 imagine many funny scenes at book-shop cash registers. Customer: "Do you have 'Fabulous Small Clerk: "Not that I know of, but our store manager is an extremely large Swede." Essayist Joseph Epstein on the title of his newest collection of short stories, which borrows a phrase from a Karl Shapiro poem. JVutfin statesman.com Sunday, July 6,2003 K5 30 years of vigor, vision and virginity Young writer retraces ups and downs of life You've got piwp mwmmmammmem. -it i ii ii L.rO 0... MEMOIR Alec Klein sorts through the wreckage of AOL Time Warner BUSINESS 1 I -fA'" STEALING .13 rs.

r1 I ill Girl Walks into a Bar: A Memoir Strawberry Saroyan Random House, $19.95 tip i Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner Alec Klein Simon Schuster, $25.95 1 i mmlxX 1 V'- If i if.1!. TV hwtn-i -f i lr mi mm 1 1 Frank Johnston AS! IIN rn )N )ST AOL Time Warner's woes took down executives Jerry Levin, left, and Steve Case. By Moira Muldoon SPECIAL TO Tl IE AMERICAN-STATESMAN There's something presumptuous about writing a memoir when you're barely 30. Or perhaps presumptuous isn't the right word. Perhaps inconclusive or unfinished or unresolved is.

But Strawberry Saroyan, granddaughter of playwright William and founder of Bleach magazine, has crafted a precocious, evocative memoir, one that ultimately benefits from its lack of resolution. Saroyan and a friend founded Bleach, a magazine targeted to contemporary hip, in-the-know, avant-garde folks. She'd worked at The Nation and at Conde Nast Traveler, but she struck out on her own, determined to create the perfect glossy, and the chapter called "Ambition" is "Girl Walks Into a Bar" 's most interesting. It is full of excitement, bursting with ideas and 20something vigor, the way that early brainstorming sessions so often were in the '90s. "We vowed only to cover (beauty) in a light, almost humorous way.

We would never a feature on 'how to wash your1 she writes of plans for the magazine. And, oh, the fantastic plans for success: "We'd have all the best tickets to the next to people like Anna and Tina and Liz," she writes of publishing doyennes Wintour (Vogue), Brown (Vanity Fair) and Tilberis (Harper's Bazaar), then dreams of telling her old boss how she was too busy to talk to him, that he'd have to hold. But the book is about far more than ambition it's about visions and fantasies of the perfect contemporary hip woman and her fantastic contemporary life. Despite the fact that Saroyan comes from a famous family, there's next to nothing about them. Instead she chooses to write about her friends, the family Of the '90s.

We get detailed stories of the nights, weeks, years spent in bars, -hanging out with other ambitious 20somethings. The bad, depressed boyfriends, the end of her relationship with her best friend, as painful as any family split these are the lonely stories that have replaced the lonely family stories we have come to expect from memoirs. Additionally, Saroyan's book opens with a discussion of her long-lasting virginity. Given that women today are meant to be the inheritors of the sexual power and freedom of the women of the '60s, Saroyan's frank discussions of her sex life or lack thereof are poignant and provoke questions about how much sex the modern single girl, weaned on Madonna, is having. I suspect that for lots of people, it's less than one might guess from watching episodes of "Friends." The.

book wraps with Saroyan meeting a woman in England who seems to be living the life she dreams of a gorgeous manor, lovely husband and children. Then Saroyan discovers the woman lost a daughter, had a son in a cult, and realizes, one more time, her fantasies of what a modern woman should be, what she should be, are just that: fantasies. "She seemed to be the idealized fantasy of what I've wanted to become, but she actually was someone I might truly become. She was happy in moments but heartbroken in others; she was in some ways perfect, but in others flawed; she had everything she wanted on some days but felt she had nothing on others. She was, again, real." Unresolved is in fact the perfect word to capture Saroyan's memoir because it is a story of becoming.

The woman who gave us Bleach, who struggled to find the great artsy friends, struggled to find perfect love with men and friends, who had a vision of womanhood should look like, realizes that there is no perfect vision and that to become the fantasy it must be let go. Saroyan's memoir is at once a bildungsroman and a keen portrait of a particular time and place the world of women in their 20s in the '90s, a place that, contrary to popular wisdom, can be as profoundly lonely as it looks glossy from the outside. Frequent Books contributor Moira Muldoon is a poet, writer and teacher. She also writes the "A Girl Walks Into a Bar. column in XLent.

strip clubs; accepting gambling lines of credit and free hookers in Las Vegas. And, far more damaging to the future of what became AOL Time Warner, they lied, cheated and bullied their underlings and their customers to pump up the company's financial reports. As Washington Post reporter Alec Klein writes in "Stealing Time," the AOL bad boys came to resemble something out of "Lord of the Flies." As long as everyone was covered with a little bit of mud, no one was willing to challenge the group's behavior. By Robert Elder Jr. AMKRICAN-STATESMAN STAI'T Who knew that a handful of America Online executives people who ran the bland, regimented Internet provider behaved like they were trying out for "Guys Gone Or that so- many key deal-makers at AOL, the big kahuna of the Internet boom, had the moral compass of Caligula? But there they were: reportedly snorting cocaine off the hoods of cars at the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa Bay; romping at But it didn't last.

After a Hulk-like rampage through the early boom of the Internet, AOL collapsed. Its willingness to cut accounting corners and allegedly commit outright fraud caught up with the company. The merged company lost nearly $100 billion in 2002, the largest annual loss in U.S. corporate history. Its stock price collapsed, heads rolled, and investors and government prosecutors descended.

But AOL didn't fall alone. "Stealing Time" tells how the See AOL, K7 Traveling man Shepard plans Austin stop Lucius Shepard Sci-fi great has been from homeless camps to Central America. that came out of that time "The End of Life As We Know are filled with beautiful prose. More than any other in his oeuvre, they are responsible for Shepard being called the Joseph Conrad of science fiction by critics. But Shepard's interests have not remained confined to one continent, or even one genre.

In the last three months, he has published four novellas that span four modes of fiction. "Louisiana Breakdown" See SHEPARD, K7 By Dorman Shindler SPECIAL TO TI IE AMERICAN-STATESMAN The days when a writer could make a decent living writing short stories the way Ray Bradbury managed to do are a thing of the past. But don't tell that to Lucius Shepard, one of the most respected writers of science fiction and fantasy for over two decades now. Shepard who will come to Austin next month" for the science-fiction convention Ar-madilloCon has won accolades and fame for dark and fiction stories about soldiers at war in the jungles of Central America, such as and "Fire-Zone Emerald." In fact, though he lives in Seattle.the writer calls Central America his spiritual home. "I have an affinity for that particular area," Shepard said in a recent phone interview.

"I spent a lot of time in El Salvador and Honduras in the '80s, when there was a great deal of American military involvement in that region due to the Contra war and the civil rebellion in Salvador." The politically charged stories intriguing stories and novellas like "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," in which an entire town lives on the back of a long-dead dragon whose evil still emanates into the township, and his futuristic science If you dig aliens and alternate realities, then ArmadilloCon is your event A Sharyn I Wizda i 9 vane biographer Robert Caro will return to Austin to take part in the Texas Monthly Book Group (Aug. 20), and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards will read from "I'm Not Slowing Down," a book on women's health that focuses on osteoporosis, the bone disease that affects an estimated 8 million American women (Aug. 22). E.

Annie Proulx returns to Book People to promote the paperback edition of "That Old Ace in the Hole" (Sept. 23), and Austin bloggeressayistBook Punk host extraordinaire Neal Pollack will read from "Never Mind the Pollacks," his novel due out in September from Harper Collins (Sept. 30). svanestatosman.com; 445-3720 has just confirmed two big names for its fall speakers' lineup: comedian Al Franken and New Age author Deepak Chopra. Franken, who will appear Oct.

4, will be promoting "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," due out just before his talk here. Chopra, the Ayurvedic devotee popularized by Oprah, will speak Nov. 5 on "Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Ciincidence to Create Miracles," also expected on shelves in October. Both events will be at Arboretum branch. Meanwhile, over at Book People, the late summerearly fall schedule is shaping up: LBJ the Old Quarry branch, 7051 Village Center Drive.

The next night marks Gilb's discussion of "Gritos," his recent collection of essays that span 20 years of writing. A former construction worker who now teaches creative writing at Southwest Texas State University and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's and "The Best American Essays," Gilb crafts engaging, stark and thought-provoking prose. He will read at 7 p.m. July 30 at the Yarbor-ough branch, 2200 Hancock Drive. Sales from books at both events benefit the library; call 974-7400 for more information.

And if you like to plan even further ahead, Barnes Noble has been raising its profile on the local literary scene, booking fiction readings from such up-and-comers as "Brownsville" short-story writer Oscar Casares and "Drift" novelist Manuel Martinez. Later this month organizers go the non-fiction route with two area scribes: University of Texas professor Debra Umberson and Austin-based writer Dagoberto Gilb. Umberson will head a discussion of her latest book, "Death of a Parent: Transition to a New Adult Identity," which features research that won her an award from the National Institute on Aging. "Parent" examines how such deaths mark a turning point for adults; the talk begins at 7 p.m. July 29 at Sci-fi fans, unite: The 25th anniversary of ArmadilloCon is coming.

The annual gathering in Austin of writers and devotees of the genre will be Aug. 8-10 at the Austin Hilton North, and some big names are already lined up. In addition to Lucius Shepard (see Dorman Shin- dler's profile, this page) and Austin favorites Bradley Denton, Bruce Sterling and Howard Waldrop, confirmed speakers include Kage Baker, author of the popular The Company series; Nebula and Hugo winner Vernor Vinge; editors Gardner Dozois and Ellen Dat-low; College Station fantasy author Martha Wells; Nacogdoches award-winner Joe Lans-dale; and John Varley, whose short story "Air Raid" was made into a Kris Kristofferson movie, "Millennium." Tickets for all three days of the fest which includes panel discussions and readings are $35 until July 25; after that the price goes up to the door price of $40. (Day passes will be available at the door for Go to www.fact.orgdillo for more information or to register. The Austin Public Library.