You may recall Monday’s blind item from the former assistant to a “top-notch” African-American novelist, who said that the woman in question had one berated him in class for allegedly trying to derail her career. Well, a day went by and nobody guessed right, so Keith Josef Adkins decided to tell a more detailed version of the story on his Blogspot blog, giving the author the ‘fake’ name of “Xem Tilson Fartier,” which is a reasonable indication that he’s talking about Xam Wilson Cartiér, the author of Be-Bop, Re-Bop and Muse-Echo Blues.
If you guessed somebody else (like I did), you can probably be forgiven: Cartiér seems to have dropped off the literati’s radar more than a decade ago, so if some guy comes around and says “I was an assistant to a famous African-American novelist who was published by Random House,” I doubt she’d be the first, second, or even third name to pop into your head. But as long as we’re here, anybody know what happened to her?