Kevin Fox

Kevin Fox is a producer and writer for the Fox TS series Lie to Me, and his professional screenwriter credits include the film The Negotiator. He splits his time between coasts, living in both Los Angeles and New Jersey. His new novel is Until the Next Time.

Earlier this month I asked Fox what he was reading.  His reply:

I usually read several things at once, predominantly reading more fiction than non-fiction and always making sure I have some reading that is purely guilty pleasure. I also sometimes am reading as a screenwriter and television writer, looking for works to adapt or at works that have been suggested for adaptation. Currently I have several books that I am working through at the same time, for different reasons.

The first is my guilty pleasure, Tom Knox’s The Lost Goddess, a thriller that explores archeology and alternative theories of our past. Having read Knox’s The Genesis Secret and The Marks of Cain, and having enjoyed them, I picked up The Lost Goddess so that I could once again look at our world through a different lens and be entertained by the action and thriller elements Knox weaves in so well.

I also have on my desk Dawn Tripp’s Game of Secrets, which seems to me to be an epic poem in prose form. Dawn’s writing is truly lyrical and the settings she describes are somehow both everyday and mysterious. I loved the mystical reality she constructs, hiding the secrets she hopes to eventually convey right in front of us and leading us through each turn like the words being played in the Scrabble game that is a central metaphor in the novel.

The third book was recommended to me by a director friend who knows me quite well and thought the themes and elements of the novel would intrigue me. I am currently about halfway through and can’t put it down, so I guess he was right. It is Lisa Carey’s In the Country of the Young, and it is full of Irish mythology, played out on an island in modern-day Maine. Part ghost story, part love story, and mythological in its scope, the novel is one that should be read alone, in a cabin by a fire on a cold winter night. It will keep you warm all on its own.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes I picked up based on the title alone, not knowing as much about it as I should have considering that it was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The title called out to me as a writer, for often I begin a story with only ‘the sense of an ending’ and work backward from that key moment in time. As I have just begun and am already intrigued by the style and mystery that has been set before me, it seems like a good pick – but I’ll have to let you know.

The last two books that are dog-eared on my shelf (and I apologize to all you purists who don’t dog-ear pages) are non-fiction, Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I love the perspective that Levitt and Dubner have on the world, in the same way that I appreciate Malcolm Gladwell’s sometimes radical perspective on events and situations most of us see and never question. I can’t say too much about this right now, but it is Levitt and Dubner’s unique perspective that I am trying to embrace as I move forward on a television project that will hopefully bring that kind of perspective to the small screen.

Visit Kevin Fox's website.

The Page 69 Test: Until the Next Time.

My Book, The Movie: Until the Next Time.

--Marshal Zeringue