Novelist Stephen Hunter Takes Out Annoying Celebs In Latest Book "I, Sniper"

The Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's latest book is called I, Sniper. He has written 15 novels to date, and Esther "Lobster" Newberg became his agent after he wrote "Dirty White Boys" in 1994.

"My agent at the time was appalled by it, and everybody I showed it to told me I was a sick and perverted old man and I should be put away," Hunter recalled. "I sent it to Esther, and she got it from the get go."

Sounds about right.

Though he was promoting I, Sniper today, Imus remarked that Hunter's "Dirty White Boys" features "one of the great opening pages of modern fiction." The main character Lamar is in prison, trying to avoid being raped by a much larger inmate.

"I chose to endow him in a certain area that was legendary," Hunter said about Lamar. "It would make him both noted and feared in the context of a brutal Oklahoma prison."

For the record, and because Imus asked, Hunter has not named his own wiener, which he said he can't even find on most days because he's so fat. Based purely on the opening scene of "Dirty White Boys," Imus has decided to go with "Lamar" for his.

The draw, at least for someone like Imus, of reading I, Sniper is that the main character Bob Lee Swagger kills Jane Fonda in the first two pages. But she's not the first — or the only — notable person to be taken out in a Hunter novel.

"I need body count to produce books, so I'm always looking for new targets," said Hunter. Swagger, a Vietnam vet and former sniper, also takes out 1960s radicals William Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, along with one of Imus's childhood heroes, Mort Sahl.

Hunter focused on the Vietnam War because of the extraordinary passion he said it ignited in America. "I can't get away from it, and I can't put it down," he said. "So I keep coming back to it."

In fact, Hunter has managed to connect the characters of Lamar and Swagger to one another in "peculiar ways" by creating a "tapestry of interlocking family history that plays out over the generations, sometimes to the good, and sometimes to the bad."

While Hunter can write tough, Imus all but chastised him for not living similarly.

"We got your five favorite songs yesterday afternoon, and then later on we get another list, and this list is from your wife!" Imus said, outraged. "Mr. Bad Ass Novelist had to get his wife to sign off on his song list!"

-Julie Kanfer