Coincidentally: NYTimes Magazine has an essay by Charles McGrath, the editor of the NYTimes Book Review, on Random House's call for a GF sequel. He writes: "Puzo himself was ambivalent about how much credit to take for The Godfather. 'I always wish I'd written it better,' he told Larry King in 1996, adding that he preferred his earlier, more literary novels, like The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim. Like a lot of artists who feel tainted by popular success...Puzo misunderstood his own gifts. The early books weren't bad, but neither were they memorable. The Godfather, though, is one of the great pop epics, and it won't be easy for Random House to come up with a writer with both Puzo's genuine sensibility and his pulpish, National Enquirer imagination...thanks to Puzo, the story of 'the family' has replaced the Western as the most enduring and revealing American myth--the one that most explains us to ourselves."