BEST AUTHOR BEST : CHRISTOPHER MOORE

The comic novelist - whose new book is the historical '' Anima Rising '' would have a hard time satirizing the present : '' The current reality seems so absurd I don't know how I could send it up.''

.-  What books are on your stand?

"The Village of the Vampire Cat,'' by Lensey Namioka, and '' The Destroyer of Worlds,'' by Matt Ruff.

And I'm rereading my own novel '' Noir '' because I'm writing another book with those characters.

.-  What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?

'' Last Days of Summer,'' by Steve Kluger. It's very funny epistolary novel set in the 1940s, about a kid who keeps writing to a baseball player on New York Giants, pretending to have different diseases and begging the player to hit a home run for him.

.-  This feels like a moment in time that calls for satire. Why turn to the past?

One, I really enjoy writing and I don't want to spend a moment more thinking about our current political situation than I have to.

Two, the current reality seems so absurd I don't know how I could send it up. Everything is so profoundly stupid.

.-  What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

'' Pride and Prejudice.'' I have seen numerous screens adaptations, so I know the story, but I'm relatively sure I'd get distracted while reading by trying to figure out how to plausibly get Elizabeth to become a ninja.

.-  The characters in '' Anima Rising '' include the artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Why?

Klimt because I admired his paintings, and Schiele because he was Klimt's protege. But it started with wanting to write about Vienna in that period because it was a genius cluster : Klimt, Mahler, Freud, Richard Strauss, Walter Gropius, not to mention political figures like :

Trotsky, Tito, Stalin and Hitler. I picked 1911 because that's the year Schiele met Klimt's model, Wally Neuzil, and the relationship between painters and models would be central to the story.

.-  In real life, was either of them funny?

Klimt wrote almost nothing about himself, or his art, for that matter, so it's hard to say, but there are a lot of photographs where he's dancing and celebrating, so it seems he very much enjoyed life.

Schiele did write about himself and his art, and he seems very dour and self critical, so not funny.

In my book, the women in their lives are the funny ones.

.-  How much cultural history do readers need to know to appreciate '' Anima Rising ''?

If you've seen the pictures of Klimt's work in books or online, and have some idea of the time period, the rest will fill in.

It helps if you've read the original '' Frankenstein '' or have seen an adaptation that's close to the novel, but I think '' Anima Rising '' will work even if you don't have the background.

The Publishing continues to Part [ 2 ].