Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen's novels have been published in 34 languages, which is 33 more than he is able to read or write. The London Observer has called him "America's finest satirical novelist," while Janet Maslin of the New York Times has compared him to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman. His latest novel is Star Island (2010).

From Hiaasen's Q & A with Euan Ferguson at the Observer:

Why just one film so far (Striptease, 1996)? So much dialogue in the books cries out for celluloid…

I've sympathy for all the screenwriters who have taken a crack. I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked. Perhaps the internal voice is hard to get across. Plus the plots… having a pit bull stuck rotting on someone's arm for 180 pages is perhaps slightly challenging cinematically.

Who doesn't like you?

Some people get upset by the column [in the Miami Herald]. The extreme right, the nuts, the ones that think Obama is somehow a socialist, a fascist and Muslim at the same time … but there's no dealing with those letters, with the crayons.

Do you worry, with your sense of right and wrong in these fast-changing times, that your thinking will ever be seen as old-fashioned?

Everybody my age worries about that. But the hardest thing for me, for anybody who writes satire or any kind of contemporary fiction, is to...[read on]

Novelist Meg Gardiner says "...nobody satirizes American excess like Hiaasen. Last week I was reading [Star Island] on a flight, and laughed so hard that I thought the flight attendant was going to taser me."

--Marshal Zeringue