NEWSWEEK INTERVIEW: Charles Frazier Author

NEW YORK, Sept. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- "All that stuff about money-I sort of understand where it comes from. Do I like it? No, I don't, but it comes with the territory," best-selling author Charles Frazier tells Senior Editor Jeff Giles in an exclusive interview about his new novel, "Thirteen Moons," in the current issue of Newsweek. "I saw something that said I was 'the symbol of greed in the publishing industry.' I'm not the one who decided what the offers were gonna be on the book. And it's not like I went into this just looking to take the highest offer," says Frazier in the September 18 of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, September 11). Several offers were in the same vicinity, Frazier says, but the strength of Random House's marketing team was a factor.

In "Thirteen Moons," Frazier returns with a mesmerizing tale about a white man fighting to save a Cherokee tribe's home and who for days, spoke nothing but Cherokee. By April 2002, Frazier had already done some legwork on the book, but knew what he'd written was too woolly to show prospective publishers. Instead, he wrote a one-page proposal for "Thirteen Moons" before coffee one morning. Random House paid $8.25 million for it, and producer Scott Rudin ponied up $3 million for the movie rights. Frazier was admonished in some newspapers for leaving the small publisher, Grove Atlantic, that had discovered him. (Grove had bid $6 million in partnership with Vintage paperbacks.) "I called my mother after the deal was done and I said, 'There may be some stuff in the papers about this'," says Frazier. "She said, 'Oh, I already know. I saw it on the crawl on CNN'." Even now, after advance raves for the new novel, there is still the occasional snipe in the media about Frazier's rich deal-evidence of our peculiar, self-fulfilling notion that art should never sell and that only hacks should get the big bucks, writes Giles.

Frazier tells Newsweek about a trip to Cherokee, North Carolina, "I came over a couple of weeks ago to meet with Chief Hicks and to say, 'I grew up here. I grew up on land that had been your land. I remember finding arrowheads in cornfields as a kid.' What I was interested in was not telling their story, but the story of this piece of country, that transition from their people to my people. I just said, 'I hope this book will be seen as the work of a good neighbor'." Frazier later had a meeting about a translation project he's funding to render portions of the novel into Cherokee, Part of an initiative to keep the language alive.

Frazier is still more comfortable being called "a country boy just like us" than "an American master."

As a Southerner who comes from an unbroken line of readers, however, he would certainly defend a person's inalienable right to be both. "One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-LAY-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do.' I was a little insulted by the Appa-LAY-chee-a business." He shakes his head. "Yep, and I got shoes on!"

(Read story at http://www.newsweek.com/.) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14757141/site/newsweek/ Book Excerpt 'Thirteen Moons': http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14738541/site/newsweek/