'A plot that carries no spare parts and a 'gentle reader' style of address combine with Dickensian characters to give the feel of a classic...A wry, self-referential story that exalts the writer, trounces the critic, and avows that both are liars. Sic semper Mark Harris' - "Kirkus Reviews". 'A wonderful story...quality fiction with staying power' - "Library Journal". 'Absorbing...a true rarity...passages rich with author Harris' love and understanding of his craft...Rimrose's struggles to forge art from life fascinate' - "Publishers Weekly".Mark Harris took you out to the ballgame in his Henry Wiggen novels, "The Southpaw", "Bang the Drum Slowly", "A Ticket for a Seamstitch", and "It Looked Like For Ever". In "The Tale Maker", he takes you to college. Rimrose was well-read, smart, and strong. As the editor of the campus Sentinel, he was perfectly placed to observe how a university worked, and ideally inclined to expose its ethical weaknesses.Supported by his parents, he could concentrate on things that mattered: his writing, his wife-to-be, and his friends and enemies - including the warped Kakapick, who serves Rimrose lastingly as model and prototype of the literary scoundrel. Rimrose - Tale Maker of the title - turns from journalism to fiction-writing, kept alive by his wife's practical and ingenious devotion to selling his stories, even those he has tossed in the trash. As he grows older and begets children, he worries about income and faces stultifying choices: managing his father's small-town newspaper or playing politics in university service. Mark Harris is a professor of English at Arizona State University. His celebrated baseball novels have also been reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press.