Menu

torsten krol

Reading

Our Most-Read Stories … Ever!

, , , , , , , ,

We at Audere had a great summer, and it gave us a chance to reflect on our best and most popular stories. Happily, our “stats” app helps, constantly reminding us which stories you, our readers, loved, and which ones you didn’t care for much at all.

The fifth most-read article was our interview with Torsten Krol. The Dolphin People writer has remained stubbornly anonymous (“Torsten Krol” is a pseudonym) and our interview was something of a “get,” his first interview in over a decade. The extremely diverse topics about which he has written books, he told us, “may have created the impression that I’m several people, and in a way I am, but all those people are located inside the one skull. Having asserted that I’m one person, I feel other questions relating to my identity are irrelevant.” It was an interesting chat.

At number 4: In 2018, the Watt O’Hugh novelist Steven S. Drachman reviewed a film weirdly titled Disney Christopher Robin, which he acknowledged that he had not seen, but which in his view told so many extravagant falsehoods about the life of the real Christopher Robin Milne that it deserved a sight-unseen pan. “[W]hy exactly do our totalitarian overlords at Disney need to tell us this lie about the life of a real man?” Drachman asks. “It is because the real Christopher Robin was not a Disneyesque creature at all; he did not believe in eternal childhood and eternal childishness. He grew up.”

In 2020, author Julie Stamm talked to us about Some Days We…., her blunt yet optimistic picture book about being a parent with multiple sclerosis. “I can say wholeheartedly that diagnosis has changed me,” Stamm told us. “I don’t really remember the old me.” The interview is our third most-read article.

In the second most-read article in Audere history, bestselling novelist Donna Levin remembers her grandmother, Rae Stern, a cheerful but secretly depressed rabbi’s widow. “What she needed, I believe, was meaningful work of her own,” Levin writes, “something that was more than just a holdover from the glory days of Rebbetzinhood.”

At #1, A Big Hand for the Raunch Hands, Drachman’s appreciation of the late Mike Chandler, who headed a raucous and popular rock band in New York in the 1980s, and who died of cancer in 2018, having never become world-famous, in spite of expectations all those years ago. “[H]e really did have a lot of great shows and a lot of fans, back then,” Drachman writes, “and not everyone has that, nights when you rule the audience, nights when you are king. I hope that means he would say he had a good life.”

And an honorable mention: Alan N. Levy wrote our seventh most-read article; as a tribute to his deceased best friend, Levy wrote, “I’d like to describe a moment that I’ll simply label, ‘The Funniest Thing Ever Said.’ ” Alan died unexpected and suddenly a few months before his debut novel, The Tenth Plague, appeared in print. We hope wherever he is now, he is enjoying all his posthumous rave reviews.

(For the record, our least popular piece was a digital painting entitled “Autumn in the City,” which depicted beautiful fall leaves puddled around piles of garbage.)

Happy reading!

^^^

Photo by Sasint / Pixabay

Chickadees Talking

Editor’s Choice: Audere Conversations

, , , , , , , , ,

We’ve interviewed some interesting writers and artists in Audere, and if you’ve never heard of some of them, then this is the opportunity to learn more.

We interviewed the idiosyncratic filmmaker Kevin Schreck, who made his name with a great documentary on the animator Richard Williams (more on him here); the screenwriter Chen Drachman, on her new film that imagines a family’s Passover secret that will change history; Leonardo DiCaprio (the actor), whose long-ago (probably) earliest interview surfaced in these pages; the great, pseudonymous and anonymous novelist, Torsten Krol, who granted his first interview in many years to Audere, and so many of the great Chickadee Prince authors, like the post-war novelist Jay Greenfield, legal-thriller writer Ed Rucker, poet-novelist Pen Pearson, Donna Levin, the author of contemporary women’s fiction featuring characters on the autism spectrum, and even an interview with Steven s. Drachman’s fictional character, Watt O’Hugh.

We also featured a series of lively political debates between novelist Alon Preiss, on the left, and iconoclastic conservative Alan Levy, on the right.

Take a look.

Image by Suju/Pixabay

Torsten Krol

Torsten Krol, a Writer in the Shadows

, ,

Steven S. Drachman: Torsten Krol’s novel, The Dolphin People, published in 2006, is a modern classic, an acclaimed bestseller about a family of Nazi sympathizers fleeing Germany for Latin America after the fall of the Reich, whose plane crashes in the jungle, and who are taken in by a society of natives. The book was a stunning marvel, an old-fashioned adventure story, a vicious political satire, and – really, not kidding – a sexy coming-of-age story, kind of. The Dolphin People made quite a stir, and was followed a few years later by Krol’s post-911 satire, Callisto, which was even more of a hit; the New York Times called it “nightmarishly amusing … There’s plenty to love.”

This author, this voice: It was inevitable that he would become world famous, hit the talk shows. Just imagine what he would be like in person. Funny, I would bet.

The only problem … “Torsten Krol” is a pseudonym. No one knows who he is, and he has remained stubbornly reclusive. Some of the speculation has been downright silly. Is he Stephen King? Stephen King’s son? Is he a conglomerate of different authors? Is he a woman?

After The Dolphin People, he published his dystopian novel (The Secret Book of Sacred Things), and then he vanished for years.

Now suddenly, he is back, publishing book after book, all Kindle only.

He was kind enough to answer five questions for us (over Twitter DM), though he will not tell us who he is, or even if he is in fact a he.

Still, it was a thrill to sort-of meet him.

 DRACHMAN: The Dolphin People is one of my favorite books – a really amazing literary achievement. How did that book come about?

KROL: As a child I was fascinated by South America, probably because one of the first adult books I read was W H Hudson’s Green Mansions. When I decided to become a writer it seemed only natural to revisit the jungle landscape that had captured me as a boy. One of my other obsessions as a youth was WWII, which I regard as the lowest point in human history. These two fixations combined in my head to become The Dolphin People.

You didn’t publish anything for several years between The Secret Book and the Foreverman series, and then many books hit Kindle in quick succession. What is the story of those years? And why Kindle only?

Between The Secret Book of Sacred Things and the Foreverman series I didn’t quit working, I just had difficulty finding a publisher who would accept what I was writing, the lament of little-known writers everywhere. My publisher has restricted publication to Kindle. Maybe when my name is better known that position can change. I’ve now presented all the work that had backed up in the interim. The internet has changed everything.

The Dolphin People has very different themes from Callisto, but they both share a vicious sense of humor and a general pessimism about people and the world. While they are dramatically different from each other, they are even more different from Foreverman, which has a different style and tone, and comes from a more commercial point of view. How do you get from Callisto to Foreverman? What drew you to the themes in Foreverman?

I draw inspiration from the novels that I enjoyed as a boy. One of my delights was Sci-Fi, which has finally become respectable over the years, maybe too much so. What I remember about reading the classics (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, etc.) was their focus on storytelling for its own sake, devoid of intellectual or literary pretensions; this is what made them work, whereas much of the more recent Sci-Fi has become serious and even a bit preachy. I wanted to capture the excitement I felt as a kid by ensuring the plot was fantastic, the characters interesting and the pace unrelenting. It took two years to pour all that out, my longest sustained period of writing to date.

On the prior question – do you understand why some people might think that Torsten Krol is actually several people? What can you tell us about who you are? Can you confirm that you are one person? A man or a woman? An Australian? Have you ever published books under another name?

I write different kinds of stories because I become bored very easily. Writing has to be fun for the author as well as for the reader. Most writers have a style and subject matter that tend not to vary much at all, but I can’t work that way. This may have created the impression that I’m several people, and in a way I am, but all those people are located inside the one skull. Having asserted that I’m one person, I feel the other questions relating to my identity are irrelevant. Autobiography is the one genre I’ll never tackle.

What is Platinum Needle? It appears to be owned by a lawyer with a whole range of experience, but also seems to publish only Torsten Krol books. What is the current Torsten Krol publishing model, how did it come about, and what does the future hold?

Platinum Needle is a publisher and producer of film, television, and digital entertainment. My association with Andrea Sloan Pink began when she wrote me a fan letter via my agent, who had just died. I was having difficulty finding a replacement (agencies can be as maddening in their snootiness as publishers) so I asked Andrea if she knew any literary agents who could help me out. After we experienced more of what I had already gone through in my search, I asked Andrea if she’d care to take on the task of representing me. To my intense relief, she accepted the challenge. Every writer fantasizes about having an agent who represents just one author, and I find myself nowadays in exactly that very desirable situation. I must have done something to please the gods.

What does the future hold? Excuse me while I dig out my crystal ball and give it a good polish.

Thanks, Steven, for the chance to chance to chat.

**

Read more about Torsten Krol here.

Watt O’Hugh and the Innocent Dead, by Steven S. Drachman, will be published by Chickadee Prince Books on September 1, 2019; it is available for pre-order in trade paperback from your favorite local independent bookstore, from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and on Kindle.  

Design by Steven S. Drachman, from an original photograph by Emiliano Vittoriosi, Unsplash. It is not actually a picture of the real Torsten Krol. It is just an anonymous face in the shadows.

Woody allen cartoon

Alon Preiss Reviews the Web

, , , ,

I started writing this column on Father’s Day, hoping to post it in the evening, when the illustration would still be topical, showing you the serious shortcoming I have as a columnist. But Father’s Day doesn’t really pass by without my thinking about Woody Allen, and that year that his son Ronan, ne Satchel, wished him a Happy Brother-in-law Day. (You see, while Woody Allen did not marry his daughter, as Woody defenders will consistently point out, all over the web  –  and what better evidence of a man’s ethical goodness is there, than the simple fact that he did not marry his daughter! – he did marry his son’s sister, which makes him Ronan’s father and Ronan’s brother-in-law. Shades of Chinatown, directed by Ronan’s mom’s good pal, Roman Polanski.)

It is pure hubris to sling an unprovable and probably untrue accusation at someone who has already done something so awful – running off with his girlfriend’s daughter, his son’s sister! – that no one would ever forgive him unless he were falsely accused of something even worse. So instead of declaring victory and going home, Mia Farrow accused her one-time partner of becoming an all-of-a-sudden, one time only child molester, and, let’s be honest, it almost certainly didn’t happen (although I suppose anything is possible). Now, as the many-decades old debunked accusations heat up again, the Farrow family has demanded, as appropriate recompense for their trauma, that all the actors and actresses in Hollywood pick a side in a dispute over something that no one could possibly know for sure. If the Farrows win on points, what will they have won? In the past, when acting with Woody meant an Oscar, Variety might note that, say, Cate Blanchett was “simply an actress who worked with a filmmaker who was never charged with a crime,” and Blanchett herself might address the situation by saying, “It’s obviously been a long and painful situation for the family and I hope they find some sort of resolution and peace,” but that kind of fence-straddling will cut it no more. I suggest a Hollywood scoreboard, with some “wins” more valuable than others. (Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin both lose points for crazy; Baldwin scores slightly hire based on career velocity. So Sarandon, who is on team Farrow, counts as a two; Baldwin, who is on team Woody, counts as a 4; and Kate Winslet, who switched from team Woody to team Mia, is a 6, for career velocity and a decided lack of crazy; she loses points for obvious insincerity in the haste of her team-switching.) Internet opinion from the sweaty masses, of course, also counts in this game; while sympathy seems to have swung a little bit back Woody’s way over the last few weeks, the I Believe Dylan Farrow Facebook site still has more members than the I Believe Woody page; but perhaps demonstrating public exhaustion with the whole thing, both pages have considerably fewer members than Medieval Puns.

Look, I am not sure why anyone wants to “win” the internet. Until the public gets to vote on someone’s guilt or innocence on the web, what exactly do all your followers get you? But, still, people think there is some kind of benefit. For example, Roseanne Barr. She asks, on Twitter, “Can you all help me get more followers here? The more I have the more my words will have weight.” Then, a couple of weeks later, in a now-deleted post, she wrote, “Help me reach 1M followers. Support me. I went out on a limb for America and against mind control & child trafficking. Help me use my voice….”

Is Roseanne somehow under the impression that her problem is that maybe people aren’t paying enough attention to the things that she says on Twitter? Doesn’t she understand  that if everyone had just ignored her twitter feed, she would still have a job!

Finally, this: In another now-deleted tweet, Roseanne wrote, “I ask God2 help me use this bad experience 2 move in2 a better place….” Because God might read Twitter? Certainly, his presence has not exactly been noticeable anywhere else for a couple of thousand years, so who knows?

In recent weeks, the web has moved from condemnation of Roseanne to a grudging realization that the web has spent the last few weeks angrily condemning a pathetic, ruined figure who, after having brought joy to millions for decades, is almost certainly now mentally ill. Some corners of the web feel bad about this.

Meanwhile, the Fibber McGee and Molly fan page is up-in-arms today to learn that back in 1960, the network recast the show for an ill-fated TV version. Look, it’s a little bit wonderful that some small divot within the world wide web can get riled about this admittedly outrageous snub of long-forgotten radio stars, which occurred 58 years ago. Fibber and Molly were a wildly popular radio couple who lived in one of those eccentric small towns. They were really quite hilarious and lovable on the radio, and their shows hold up even today. When they retired from their show because of Molly’s worsening health problems, which resulted from her alcoholism, the network hired two new actors to “play” Fibber and Molly on TV. It’s sort of as if NBC, rather than hiring a new host for the Tonight Show, had just recast the “role” of Johnny Carson.

Certainly recasting Fibber and Molly resulted in disastrous TV, and it occurred to me that if someone chose to replace Torsten Krol, the entirely anonymous and mysteriously reclusive author of the bestselling modern classic novels Dolphin People and Callisto, you might get something like 2018’s Torsten Krol disastrous novel rollout. Two months ago he published the first two books in a new six-book series, something called Foreverman, he even released a weird promotional video, and no one anywhere cares even at all. How is it possible that one of the greatest authors of our time – and a famous great author, at that – a great author who has sold many books and been acclaimed in little papers like the New York Times, and who once set the literary world on fire trying to guess whom he could possibly be – how could an entertaining, talented and mysterious gadfly like this have sunk so low? Man oh man, I really hope this isn’t the end of the line for Torsten Krol.

On that note, good night.

Alon Preiss is the author of A Flash of Blue Sky (2015) and In Love With Alice (2017), which are both available from Chickadee Prince Books.

Please subscribe for free to Audere Magazine to receive our latest stories in your inbox

* indicates required