Who Goes There

A year before Lewinsky became a household name, Leon Rooke was at work on a novel about an aging right-wing southern senator’s shenanigans with interns; about fraudulent Vietnam War heroes; and about the real players in the Washington power playpen: the doorman at the Watergate, the local mafia don and his floozies, the no-neck “spin-doctors” who “clean up” after the celebrities. Reading Who Goes There is like taking a stroll though a modern-day Hieronymous Bosh painting where anything goes and goes on.

Leon Rooke is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor and critic. He has published 28 books, and nearly 300 short stories He was born in rural North Carolina in 1934, lived in British Columbia (Canada) for a good many years, then moved east to Eden Mills in 1987, where he became the founder and artistic director of the popular Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. He has taught or served as writer-in-residence at over a dozen Canadian and U.S. universities, and conducted workshops both in Canada and abroad. His work has been widely translated, most recently in Croatian, Italian, Japanese, and French. His critical work has been published extensively in Canada and the U.S., including the Washington Post Book World and the New York Times Book Review.