Richard Crasta, Author

I was just going through "The Killing of an Author," one of the three books of my Freedom Trilogy, and one that often delights me when I reread it, and came upon this Footnote, which made me smile and I must, really must share this with my few readers (there are actually many such passages in this book and in "Impressing the Whites", but this struck me as a wee bit more exuberant--and non-pc-- than the rest): 1.      Why Rushdie, with his literary eminence and wealth, would want to do something so prosaic and academic and policeman-like as edit an anthology of Indian literature and function as doorkeeper, chowkidar, or San Pedro to the gates of his own profession, his own country as it were, beats me. Perhaps it is that Rushdie, even though he has one of the world’s biggest pies all to himself, more pie than he, his wives, his mistresses, their ex-boy friends, and all of their children put together could ever eat, still wants to poke his finger into ever...

From The Killing of an Author:    As a matter of principle, it is important to preserve uncompromising writers like me, because as Tom Hayden says in How to Save the World (a quote I picked up on the Internet): “You can’t break the cycle of poverty; you can’t break the cycle of violence; you can’t break the cycle of corporate expansion; you can’t break the cycle of the arms race; you can’t break the cycle of imprisonment, if you don’t break the cycle by which radicals are isolated, idealists are turned into pragmatists, and pragmatists into opportunists.” Isolated, fatwahed, starved, and broken. Yes, you need to protect the writers who would, as Bill Clinton said of Bob Dylan, disturb the peace and discomfort the powerful. The Killing of an Author also contains this appeal to Sonny Mehta, President of Knopf, who had praised my novel "The Revised Kama Sutra" in glowing terms, and according to Harriet Wasserman, had offered to publish it, an...