Sometimes good things happen in bars, though that was seldom my experience. One time, though, I sat at the bar of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York with a literary agent who turned to me at some point and asked, “Do you like Harry Shearer?” As the kind of movie fan who could quote great swathes of dialog from This is Spinal Tap, this was like asking me if I was a fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (same thing). Uh, yes. And so I got to work with Harry on his first novel, Not Enough Indians. It was, no surprise, an edgy, absurdist ensemble comedy, and no surprise that Harry was a warm and funny man and a fount of stories about Hollywood past and present. The cover painting was done by New Yorker artist Bruce McCall and I always thought it was just pretty perfect.