'Zeitoun' author Dave Eggers scurries from questions about book's ...

Award-winning author Dave Eggers continues to shirk -- or rather, flee --?questions over the protagonist of his acclaimed nonfiction account of a New Orleans painting contractor trapped in the rubble of the city's post-Katrina criminal justice system. The San Francisco-based author penned "Zeitoun" as a kind of tribute to the love and perseverance of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his then-wife, Kathy, as?he first rescued neighbors, then sat in jail for nearly a month on a bogus looting count.

But that tender depiction has come under strain lately, leaving Eggers in an awkward literary pickle.

Last week, a state grand jury indicted Abdulrahman Zeitoun on charges of attempted first-degree murder and solicitation of first-degree murder.

Orleans Parish prosecutors accuse him of beating on Kathy Zeitoun, now his ex-wife, with a tire iron on Prytania Street in July, then offering a fellow inmate $20,000 to kill her, her son and another man.

The Syrian-born Zeitoun, 54, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday. A discovery hearing has been set for Dec. 7.

Eggers, who won an American Book Award for his 2009 account of the family's travails, declined in an e-mail this week to speak with a Times-Picayune reporter.

And at the National Book Awards this week, Eggers appears to flat-out flee from a question about Zeitoun, as seen in this YouTube video in which he deftly negotiates a crowd to escape a trailing questioner.

Film director Jonathan Demme, who for years has pushed to make an animated adaptation out of Eggers' book, could not be reached through his agent in Los Angeles. An assistant said Friday that the project remains "in development."

In June, Demme told the Times-Picayune that "we're deep into the script," but that raising money had proven challenging for an animated film about a Muslim-American family.

A call on Friday to McSweeney's, the literary publishing house that Eggers founded, was not immediately returned.

Eggers created the Zeitoun Foundation, which has distributed more than $250,000 in grants, largely from the author's book profits, to projects in New Orleans,.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun also garnered a "Spirit of Humanity" award sponsored by the Arab American Institute Foundation.

Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/11/video_zeitoun_author_dave_egge.html

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