Adam Rapp is one of those polymaths you read about. A playwright, novelist, musician, screenwriter, director, basketball player… He’s written a couple dozen plays, including Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter (2006); The Metal Children (2010), which starred Billy Crudup in its New York premiere; and Nocturne (2001), an icy portrait of grief which prompted Variety to label Rapp one to watch “with keen interest”. His books fall into both the young adult and adult-adult categories. They include The Year of Endless Sorrows (2006); 33 Snowfish, a tale of sexual abuse that the American Library Association chose as one of its 2004 highlights; and Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (2004), which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the Schneider Family Book Award. The Children and the Wolves, published in 2012, is a particularly intense brew. The writing is by turns visceral and tender. Take Wiggins, who emerges as the central character: Sometimes I imagine myself in a pickle jar, floating in science juice. Barely alive with see-through skin. My heart like a little white raisin. But later: I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than […]
Read MoreWhen I was seventeen I went through a massive Doors phase. I loved the music, of course. But no doubt it was also partly an attraction to the grotesque, doomy romanticism of Jim Morrison, “his ideal of following in the footsteps of Rimbaud replaced by an image of Marat dead in his bathtub”. About a year ago I went through a second, more intense Doors phase. (Still there, actually.) And judging from the experience of Greil Marcus, just quoted, whose excellent book on the Doors is subtitled A Lifetime Listening to Five Mean Years (PublicAffairs, 2011), I’m going to spend the rest of my life returning to them again and again and again and… Jim Morrison’s shamanic aura is at the heart of the Doors’ music. The band made an indelible mark on late ’60s US culture with their six top ten studio albums; astonishing, meandering live shows; and the notoriety occasioned by Morrison’s infamous exposure onstage in Miami in 1969. They even appear in a short vignette in Joan Didion’s kaleidoscopic essay “The White Album“, a literary affirmation of their cultural centrality. But what sustains the myth of the Doors is their eerie prescience, the spooky sensation that in their music […]
Read MoreEscaping the “melting concrete armpit” of Manhattan is what many New Yorkers will be dreaming of in the infernal months ahead. When the tarmac starts to gleam and descending to the subway becomes a Dantean prospect, a couple of weeks in a Mallorcan villa sounds like just the ticket. You’re in luck! Open Emma Straub’s The Vacationers (Riverhead Books, 2014), and that’s exactly where you’ll find yourself. As elder son Bobby observes, “The Posts were masters of self-delusion, all of them”. But in Straub’s second novel it is the fate of the Post family to have their eyes comprehensively de-wooled. The Mallorca trip was supposed to be a celebration of Jim and Franny’s thirty-five years of marriage, but in the wake of a seismic indiscretion on Jim’s part, that notion has come to seem like “a joke with a terrible punch line”. His career at a men’s lifestyle magazine called Gallant has recently come to an ignominious close after the revelation of an affair with a twenty-three-year-old editorial assistant called Madison. Franny, herself a successful journalist and writer, is devastated. In addition to the prospect of losing her husband, her younger child, Sylvia, is set to depart for college in […]
Read MoreIn this article, originally published in The Sunday Times in the UK, House of SpeakEasy co-founder Amanda Foreman outlines the ongoing battle between online retailer Amazon and book publishers, led by Hachette Book Group. One of the greatest monopolies in history was the medieval Catholic Church. Its religious and temporal power was absolute until confronted by an even more potent rival: the printed book. Today, print is once more at the centre of a cultural revolution. Only this time it is not the challenger to a global monopoly but its most successful weapon. Amazon, founded and controlled by Jeff Bezos, used the humble book to leverage itself into becoming the world’s largest online retailer. It took 20 years for Amazon to emerge as a monopolistic power. Last week, by creating an effective blacklist of authors for use as a bargaining tool against Hachette Book Group, the company showed us how far it would go in its abuse of that power. The public has only recently become aware of the long shadow war between Amazon and the publishing industry. In February Amazon began quietly “disappearing” certain authors in an attempt to force Hachette into giving larger discounts on its books. What […]
Read MoreI’ve never been psychoanalyzed… I’ve never even consulted a psychiatrist… I work out all my problems in my work. — Truman Capote By the time Capote died, at the age of fifty-nine in 1984, years of substance abuse had shrunk his brain. His last completed book was In Cold Blood eighteen years previously. A heavily trailed follow-up, Answered Prayers, appeared in fragments so poisonous that the Park Avenue ladies whose adoration he’d cultivated for so long made a mass exodus from Mount Truman. His later years were characterised, in the words of William Todd Schultz, by “Studio 54, cocaine, prescription pills, Stoli vodka in an unmarked glass”. In a disastrous and notorious TV interview with Stanley Siegel, an evidently fried Capote confessed that his problems with alcohol and drugs would mean that “eventually I’ll kill myself… without meaning to…” Shortly before his death, he bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, knowing that his time was short. He died in the arms of his friend Joanne Carson. Schultz’s psychobiographical Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2011) puts Capote’s spectacular implosion under the microscope, finding in his early life the blueprint for his early death. Answered Prayers was […]
Read MoreIf you don’t know Bob Mankoff, reading his memoir, How About Never — Is Never Good For You?: My Life in Cartoons (Henry Holt, 2014), will be a glorious case of friends-at-first-sight. That’s his cheery cartoon self beaming out from the front cover there, and he’s welcoming you to the wittiest party in town: the world of the New Yorker‘s cartoon department. Inside, there’s space for aspiring cartoonists to add their name to the list of dedicatees (a roll-call of every artist ever published in the magazine), while the flap copy promises “732 FOOLPROOF SECRETS TO WINNING THE NEW YORKER CAPTION CONTEST!” It’d be crazy to forgo such hospitality. And as a cartoonist who’s overseen the publication of fourteen thousand New Yorker cartoons — and contributed more than nine hundred — Mankoff is very well placed to show us what he calls “the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, selection, editing, and publishing”. Although billed as a memoir, How About Never is as much a tribute to the art and practitioners of cartooning, and Mankoff devotes generous space to the words and pictures of his colleagues. Raised in the Bronx and Queens, Bob is the son of Mollie and Lou Mankoff, who sound a bit like a nicer version […]
Read MoreWhatever you think you know is subject to change at my whim. I will not be contained by my news feeds and online purchases, by your complicated algorithms for simplifying a man. Watch me break out of the hole you put me in. I am a man, not an animal in a cafe. Goddamn auto correct. I wrote back immediately. I meant “cage”. — Dr. Paul O’Rourke to Dr. Paul O’Rourke in Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again At A Decent Hour Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., is a brilliant dentist but a troubled human being. Searching ceaselessly but fruitlessly for “something” that might be “everything” — God, kids, the gym — his existence is nonetheless dominated by office life and Red Sox games. Joshua Ferris, whose Then We Came To The End won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel, has scored another home run with the excellent, vaguely disturbing satire To Rise Again At A Decent Hour (Little, Brown, 2014). One day, one of Paul’s patients tells him on his way out the office that he’s off to Israel. Not because he’s Jewish, he says, but because he’s an Ulm — “and so are you!” Not knowing what an Ulm is, and […]
Read MoreYou’re back at work after a lovely long weekend. You log on to your computer. What’s the first thing you do? Check the news? Read on. In his latest book, Alain de Botton, who has made a career examining how we love, live and work, tackles one of the most ubiquitous yet under-analysed aspects of modern life. The News: A User’s Manual (Pantheon Books, 2014) sets out to expose the essentially weird and hazardous relationship we have with news. De Botton’s concern stems from a simple worry: given that the news is the dominant form of education for the world’s adult population, shouldn’t we be more concerned by its unselfconscious presentation of a simplistic worldview? After all, who hasn’t felt at times that the news is just depressing, unedifying, even boring? It affords us direct access to what de Botton calls “the crucible of human horror” without once acknowledging the flipside (“65 million people go to bed every night without hitting or murdering anyone”). It introduces us to a range of characters enviable for their looks, wealth and fabulous successes, then strikes them down for their hubris. It blows our tiny minds with fiscal stats no more truly comprehensible than the […]
Read MoreBorgesian understatement, Nixonian analysis, Putinian philosophy, and a rediscovered Kodak disc camera. The ink, the wine, and the laughs were all flowing at Tuesday’s Seriously Entertaining show as another smashing line-up of writing talent mused aloud on the creative process and the terror that one day the ink might just dry up altogether. Amanda Vaill was first in the spotlight with a tale from her new book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). When war broke out, the writers who answered the call to arms were all generally afraid that “their ink was running dry”, not least Ernest Hemingway, one of the stars of Hotel Florida, whose writing career in the mid-1930s was far from soaring. “But those who were the new face, the new day,” said Vaill, “were the photographers, the film-makers.” Most famous amongst them were Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, whose philosophy was summed up by Capa’s maxim, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Capa and Taro are perhaps best known for the image of the “Falling Soldier”, which Vaill contends was a staged shoot gone fatally wrong. Whatever the circumstances, it made their name, […]
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