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Novelist William Styron Dead at 81
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" Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron, the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and Sophie's Choice/> has died. He was 81.

They were the children of Hemingway and Faulkner and survivors of World War II: young, muscular writers who lived hard, worshipped the craft and believed that through the Great American Novel, they could capture the world. Norman Mailer. James Jones. Irwin Shaw. And William Styron.

"I guess it felt like an opportunity," Kurt Vonnegut told The Associated Press as he talked about his longtime friend, who died Wednesday at age 81. "There had been such grotesque injustice to be fought against the Nazis, and the Japanese, and afterward you really got the sense that we were the good guys."

Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose explorations of the darkest corners of the mind were charged by personal demons that nearly drove him to suicide, died in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He had been in failing health for a long time.

Although often cited along with Vonnegut and Mailer as a leading writer of his generation, he produced little over the past 15 years. Styron was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after "Sophie's Choice," which came out in 1979.

"He had a lot of things wrong with him," Gore Vidal told the AP. "He had a bad ending."

Showing no let-up in its aggressive tone, the WGA West drew an estimated 900 members Wednesday morning to an enthusiastic "unity rally" at the Pan Pacific Park amphitheater followed by picketing outside CBS Studios in Hollywood. Although the current WGA film-TV contract doesn't expire for 13 months, WGA West president Patric Verrone promised that the rally was only the first of a string of such events.

"As we build up to the 2007 contract negotiations, this guild will be hosting more of these rallies, more meetings, more events," Verrone told the crowd. "We will be taking all sorts of actions as needed. Your support is vital." Event coincided with the season's launch of "America's Next Top Model" on the CW, part-owned by CBS. "Top Model" has been struck by its dozen writers for the past nine weeks over the netlet's refusal to grant the WGA jurisdiction. Despite the WGA's inability to organize a single reality show, Verrone insisted the guild's not wavering from its increased emphasis on organizing non-union work.

"The purpose of this morning's rally is to unite writers of various disciplines -- TV with features, fiction with nonfiction, live action with animation, daytime with latenight, new media with traditional markets," Verrone said. "And it is in that regard that I announce today the WGA doctrine for the 21st century -- that every piece of media with a moving image on the screen or a recorded human voice must have a writer. And every writer must have a WGA contract. For our friends in the press, that was the sound bite."

Loudest cheers during Verrone's speech came when he asked the crowd to recognize the striking writers from "America's Next Top Model." And he cited guild unity as the key factor in WGA advances -- from pension and health benefits and residuals to recent deals for "The Daily Show," "Lost," the vidgame version of "The Family Guy" and the Fox feature "Everybody's Hero." "When we win a contract for the writers of 'America's Next Top Model,' and for all the reality writers and editors who stand with us today, it will be because we are united," he added.

Wilkin died Saturday, said S. Reese, director of Woodlawn Roesch-Patton Funeral Home. Wilkin had learned last year that her 2003 triple-bypass heart operation had failed and that she was not a candidate for another procedure. "It's OK," she said. "I have my faith. I am ready to go. Don't be sad for me."

Wilkin was a founder of the Nashville Songwriters Association, a non-profit group that advocates for songwriters, and was dubbed "the den mother of Music Row." She was inducted into Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1975. She is credited with discovering Kris Kristofferson, who released a statement Sunday calling her a "tough, intelligent and funny woman making it in a man's world."

Born Marijohn Melson in Texas, she was the grandchild of a country fiddler and learned to play piano as a child. After graduating from college, she became a schoolteacher in Tulsa, and started writing songs for her choir. She moved to Nashville in 1958 and was signed as a songwriter by Cedarwood Publishing company. She scored her first major hit when she and John D. Loudermilk created Waterloo in 1959. Stonewall Jackson's recording topped the country and pop charts.

"Well, horror is all about a visceral response. And the visceral response becomes increasingly difficult over the course of the years. I don't think the original Dracula is going to cause a whole lot of goose bumps."

"However, a movie like The Sixth Sense, where you see virtually no blood, no violence, is incredibly powerful, a really great horror film that is genuinely frightening and suspenseful. I think there's a great tradition of the [Palecki] independence, the guys who have to grab attention by screaming the loudest, that led to the grind house cinema of the '70s that I think that Rodriguez and Tarantino are glorifying because there was so much vitality and life and wildness, and this unbridled sense of 'We can do whatever we want to do.' And screaming for attention like a kid crying for its bottle."

Garris continued: "I think horror is supposed to be rude. It's supposed to break the rules, and it's one of the reasons that it has such a large adolescent and young adult audience, is because it's a breakaway genre. It is to movies what rock and roll is to classical music."

When asked if he thought Masters of Horror was trying to bring horror to a higher level, to be more than just shock value, but enhance the richness of the genre, Garris replied, "That's what we would like, is to have the broadest possible definition of horror. Horror can be literate, it can be smart, it can be -- it can just be rude and assaultive."

Just a few days after the Vietnam Writers' Association announced the awards for 2006, Ly Hoang Ly, a young Vietnamese poet, sent a letter of refusal to the association. The Vietnam Writers' Association awards are the most prestigious ones in the country for written works. This year, the fiction award was given to the book "Boundless rice field" by Nguyen Ngoc Tu, a young writer from the south, while the award for poems was given to poet Huu Thinh, chairman of the association.

Thinh has won the award several times. In her letter to the association, Ly wrote that she thought that the judgement did not sound serious enough. She also said that candidates running for the awards were disrespected.

This is not the first time an award from the Vietnam Writers' Association has been refused. Previously, renowned Vietnamese author Ho Anh Thai declined the award given to him for his novel. Ly Hoang Ly was born in 1975. She is a poet, artist and has had many exhibitions of installation launched in Vietnam as well as in other countries. Lo Lo is her second volume of poems; it was first published in 2005. Her previous one, Co trang (White grass), won the Yellow Apricot award given by Nguoi Lao Dong Newspaper.

Dennis Publishing's Maxim magazine - known for cover photos of sexy women - will try to sizzle in another business. On Wednesday, it will announce the launch of a bar and steakhouse chain under the Maxim name.

In a partnership with Jeffrey Chodorow's China Grill Management, at least 15 Maxim Prime restaurants will open over five years, the first in spring.

The deal is part of the media company's strategy to bolster its bottom line through licensing the well-known brand name for other ventures. The men's magazine has also put its brand on shower curtains, furniture and a soon-to-be-built casino.

Maxim Prime will be designed to appeal to customers in their 20s and 30s, Dennis CEO Stephen Colvin says. The average age of the Maxim reader is 27.