Just when you think it can't get worse, ...it does !!!!

College Professor and novelist Mark Winegardner was chosen by Random House to write the next Godfather Novel.

This was a No Win situation. You didn't want an Italian "selling out" to write this book. But then to have someone write about the Corleones, like Mark Winegardner, who knows as much about Italian American culture, as I do about Tibetan culture (None!) is tragedy.

If Winegardner knows about the Moe Dalitz gang in Cleveland or the neighboring "Purple Gang" in Detroit, he may know about Jewish culture, but certainly not Italian. [I was born and raised in Cleveland]

Additionally, although his profile states he has a "knack" for writing about "crime," his writing basically revolves around Louis Seltzer's crusade to lynch Sam Shepard, and touches also on the political corrupt and inept of Cleveland.
 
 

Sounds like they are sending a "Shoplifter" to do an Intricate "Caper".
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Thanks to LindaAnn LoShiavo,

COLLEGE PROFESSOR WINS 'GODFATHER' CONTEST

Mark Winegardner is joining the Corleone family business: He's been selected to write the next "Godfather" novel.

Winegardner, a fiction writer whose previous subjects include baseball, Cleveland and organized crime, was proclaimed the winner Friday of a contest to continue the saga of Mario Puzo's fictional crime family.

The decision, made by Random House and the Puzo literary estate, was announced on the "Today" show. "The Godfather Returns" is tentatively scheduled to be released in the fall of 2004.

"There are many stories left to tell," said Winegardner, 41, director of the creative writing program at Florida State University. "There's pressure just to write a good book anyway, and that's really all I'm trying to do," Winegardner said.

Random House plans a "big" first printing, but some question the level of curiosity about the Corleones. In an e-mail sent last fall to literary agents, Random House editor Jonathan Karp wrote that he was looking for "someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote `The Godfather' — at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice."

Puzo, who died in 1999, was $20,000 in debt and supporting a wife and five children when he sat down to write "The Godfather," which came out in 1969. "It was really time to grow up and sell out," the author later said.

Karp said he received more than 100 proposals, many of them quickly rejected, including one that had Michael Corleone fall in love with an American Indian social activist.

Two were turned down because the authors were British. Winegardner's books include the baseball novel "Prophet of the Sandlots",The Veracruz Blues,
and "Crooked River Burning," a class conscious story set in Cleveland.

Like Puzo, he has a knack for writing about crime. Unlike Puzo, he is not Italian.

"The Godfather" has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and led to a pair of classic American films that collected nine Academy Awards. Puzo, who collaborated on the screenplays, won two Oscars.

BooksandAuthors.net
http://www.booksandauthors.net/News.html
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RAA SYNOPSIS OF " CROOKED RIVER BURNING"

The hero of the book, David Zielinsky, is the product of Cleveland's ethnic, blue-collar West Side, and has lived with his Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan Lychak, instead of with Mikey Z., his father, a mob-connected Teamster Union official ; his dream girl, Anne O'Connor, hails from snooty Shaker Heights It's no surprise when these two fall in love, but they spend many years tiptoeing around this inevitability.

The love story is interwoven with the interior life of Cleveland, Ohio, from the city's peak in the '40s to its lowest ebb in 1969, and some of Cleveland's luminaries:
Dorothy Fuldheim, the city's woman broadcasting pioneer; Carl Stokes, its groundbreaking black mayor; Louis Seltzer, the editor of the Cleveland Press, Alan Freed, the rock & roll DJ.

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Crooked River Burning" by Mark Winegardner

This unexpected, but moving, fictional tribute to Cleveland teems with real-life figures.

By Amy Reiter
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February 21, 2001 | "What you don't understand about love," Cleveland political boss and one-term mayor Tom O'Connor tells his daughter, Anne, halfway through Mark Winegardner's novel "Crooked River Burning," "is that you don't fall in love with someone in spite of his flaws, but because of them ... When the things that are wrong with a person are things that interest you ... then you know you really have something."

The same can be said of the love of a place.

Mark Winegardner loves Cleveland. Old Cleveland. The Cleveland that existed before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and its upscale ilk came along and rescued the city from its status as a national joke. The Cleveland of the '50s and '60s -- its depressed downtown and optimistic suburbs, its local heroes and small-time hoods, its beleaguered sports teams, polluted river, belching factories, race riots ... flaws or not, he loves them all. It is this love -- shared by Winegardner's characters, many of them real live Clevelanders past -- that propels "Crooked River Burning."

So is it not the ultimate testimonial that, well before Winegardner's story gracefully and deliberately winds its way toward its destination, we grow to love Cleveland, too?

"Crooked River Burning" is also a love story of the more conventional sort. David Zielinsky, an ambitious, handsome boy from a working-class ethnic neighborhood, meets Anne O'Connor, a beautiful, smart woman from wealthy Shaker Heights. The year is 1948. They are young. They are feckless. They are drawn to each other, but smart enough to know their worlds cannot merge -- their backgrounds are too different. Instead, for years, their lives will run nearly parallel in a city they both love.

They will end up together, but not, at least not really, until the book's last pages. Telling you this doesn't ruin the story, since Winegardner makes no secret of it. His Cleveland holds plenty of mysteries anyway. He hints at them in simple, unadorned sentences, rather like these. Midwestern sentences -- solid, no frills. Sentences that tell as much in what they don't say as in what they do. Winegardner reveals things in an order of his own devising -- not wedded to chronology, but in the order, it seems, that they occur to him. Deftly, confidently, he weaves together the strands of his story, the lives of his characters.

David and Anne share these pages with people like Eliot Ness, who returned to Cleveland after he brought down Al Capone and fell on tougher times; Alan Freed, who invented the phrase "rock and roll" and staged the first rock concert; the notorious Cleveland doctor Sam Sheppard, whose murder trial was at one time almost as hot a topic of discussion in the city as the Cleveland Indians. Names you recognize, but maybe didn't know that much about.

There are other people in Winegardner's Cleveland. People you may not have heard of. Good people. Some maybe not so good. All of them interesting. All of them, somehow, worthy of Winegardner's love and our attention. All of whom, along with this city, we come to love in a way that is neither sappy, nor sentimental, nor unaware of their flaws.

It is because of their flaws that we come to love them. Then you know you really have something.

salon.com
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About the writer
Amy Reiter is a senior writer for Salon People.