Friends and family of William Sleator held a memorial service at New York City's Rubin Museum of Art last Friday afternoon for the author, who died earlier this year at the age of 66 in the Thai village he had adopted as a second home. His first editor, Ann Durell (r.), recalled that he began writing YA novels in the early 1970s with Blackbriar, while Egmont publisher Elizabeth Law (l.), who became Sleator's friend while working at Penguin in the '80s and '90s, shared stories of visiting with him and his partner in Asia and of his willingness to accept editorial feedback. (Durrell also noted that it took five drafts before he wrote the card game into Interstellar Pig, which became one of his most successful novels.) Susan Van Metre, who was his editor at Dutton after Durrell's retirement and continued to publish him when she moved to Amulet Books, read one of his favorite poems, Hillaire Belloc's "Jim."
After a slideshow accompanied by pieces by Ravel and Debussy which Sleator (himself an accomplished pianist) especially enjoyed, librarian Stephen Weiner and Sleator's younger brothers, Tycho and Danny, shared their own personal reminiscences, as well as scenes from two books which drew upon the siblings' relationship, The Green Futures of Tycho and Oddballs--although Tycho was careful to point out after reading a passage from Oddballs that described Danny as a particularly unattractive baby, "he embellished a lot, and I think he made some of this stuff up." Sleator's other novels included House of Stairs, Strange Attractors and Singularity; his last book, The Phantom Limb, was published earlier this month by Amulet.