Looks like I won't be meeting Jonathan Littell

In my time at Spotlight, I've met such best-selling writers as Michael Crichton, Robert Harris and John Naisbitt. They met me because they were promoting their books and thought that an article in Spotlight magazine would help them reach the right kind of readers.

But it looks like I won't be meeting Jonathan Littell anytime soon.

Littell is the author of The Kindly Ones, an epic 992-page Holocaust novel that has sold 800,000 copies in France alone. If HarperCollins, which paid a $1,000,000 advance for the North American rights for The Kindly Ones, had hoped that Littell would join Oprah Winfrey's Book Club or appear on the Jay Leno show, like President Obama did, it must be feeling very disappointed right now. Last week, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal spoke to the writer in his Barcelona home. Here's how the interview ended:

Trachtenberg: Will you come to the US to promote your book?
Littell: No. I don't do that kind of thing. I don't consider it my job.

By the way, my Microsoft Word program keeps changing the writer's family name to "Little" and I see that Google delivers more results for the inaccurate "Littel" (556,000) than the correct "Littell" (315,000). So, one of the good things about not having to meet Jonathan Littell anytime soon is that I don't have to worry about spelling his name properly.