Posts From Author: Blog
Bedlam and Barneys: The Life and Pahty Tahmes of Simon Doonan
The Asylum: True Tales of Madness from a Life in Fashion by Simon Doonan NY: Blue Rider Press, 2013; 288pp Simon Doonan once called Kate Moss “a working-class slag from a crap town.” This got him into hotter water than he deserved given that it was hedged by a friendly subordinate “just like me.” All he wanted was to express the pride and solidarity Brits from such crap towns (Doonan: Reading; Moss: Croydon) tend to feel. His riotous latest, The Asylum, out in nattily tactile paperback next month (those pinheads are extruded, amigos), is full of moments when figures from the world of fashion have opened their mouths and been promptly misunderstood. That time Karl Lagerfeld said Adele was “a little too fat, but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice.” When Tom Ford slipped a delicate “cunt” into a eulogy. Galliano-gate. In his author’s note, Doonan quotes Diana Vreeland’s “Exaggeration is my only reality;” by the end of the book one feels this really is the only context in which haute couture can possibly be understood. Not that Doonan’s not fully cognizant of the high absurdity of fashion at its most fabulously unacceptable. The book’s title is […]
Read MoreScreaming and Laughing at the Same Time… with R.L. Stine
For many people, R.L. Stine‘s is a name that will induce a spasm of delicious fear. Stine has been frightening children since the publication of his first shocker, Blind Date, in 1986. And it’s fear on an industrial scale: his books have sold over four hundred million copies, prompting the New York Times to speculate that he “may have given more chills to more children than any author in history.” He’s sold more than Tom Clancy and John Grisham, more even than Stephen King, to whom he’s often been compared. Some three hundred books after Blind Date, he’s still at it, with plans for a new raft of Fear Street titles following the success of 2014’s Party Games (St. Martin’s Griffin). Last seen in 1995, Fear Street is one of several phenomenally popular series Stine has created, the most famous of which is perhaps Goosebumps. From Welcome to Dead House in 1992, via The Cuckoo Clock of Doom (Stine’s favorite, 1995), to the most recent instalment, The 12 Screams of Christmas (2014), the Goosebumps series made Stine America’s bestselling writer for three consecutive years in the 1990s, according to USA Today. It was also a hugely successful TV series. Stine […]
Read MoreReadEasy, 19 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. I'm at that bit* in my new book where I've no idea what's going on or what I'm doing.*from around page 30 to page 250— Ian Rankin (@Beathhigh) January 13, 2015 Ahead of the House of SpeakEasy Gala on Wednesday, January 28, at City Winery NYC, read our reviews of books by our guests, including P.J. O’Rourke‘s The Baby Book: How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again (Grove Press, 2014) and Susan Fales-Hill‘s Imperfect Bliss (Atria Books, 2012). Rachel Kushner on “Bad Captains”… “My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago,” writes Kushner in the London Review of Books, “as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm.” But never mind the fraying of “the thin membrane of civility” that occurs in bad weather; what do you do if your captain abandons ship? In a wide-ranging meditation on “the noble law of the sea,” encompassing Joseph Conrad, Jonathan Franzen, Jean-Luc Godard, and The Love Boat, the author of The […]
Read MoreImperfect Bliss
Imperfect Bliss by Susan Fales-Hill NY: Atria Books, 2012; 304pp The narrative and social challenges facing women in the early twenty-first century are at the center of Susan Fales-Hill’s second novel, the romantic comedy Imperfect Bliss. Its heroine, Bliss (Elizabeth) Harcourt, spends much of her time attempting to shield her young daughter, Bella, from the pernicious myth that princesshood is both attainable and desirable. Her sisters — Diana, Charlotte, Victoria — all struggle, more or less consciously, with the roles pressed upon them by that oppressive Big Other of adulthood, reality TV. Their mother, a woman who’s so successfully internalized the racist jibes she suffered as a child that she’s placed a ban on her daughters marrying black men, is the grotesque (if not unsympathetic) product of a lifetime of such social molding. Forsythia’s aspirations for her daughters are grand, as evinced by her naming them after British royals, but they do not necessarily involve happiness. When we meet Bliss, she’s on day 375 of a sex drought following her separation from her by-now-ex-husband Manuel, a politician she caught cheating in his campaign office. Divorced, mid-thirties, and sharing a room with Bella in her family home in an upmarket suburb […]
Read MoreThe Boom Years: P.J. O’Rourke On What Went Wrong… And Right
The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again by P.J. O’Rourke NY: Grove Press, 2014; 272pp “History would have been very different,” writes P.J. O’Rourke; “a C+ at least — if the Baby Boom had ruled the world.” Born in the two decades between the end of the Second World War and the advent of The Beatles on US shores, the Baby Boom is a 75-million-strong demographic that got American history in a headlock in the Sixties and likely won’t let go for another couple decades, given the way the next election’s shaping up. As a generation (and a generalization) they are responsible, near enough entirely, for the world we live in now. And the contradictions of a generation that can be all Haight-Ashbury one minute and selling collateralized debt obligations the next may seem too titanic for a single book to lasso. O’Rourke, though — a journalist, satirist, commentator, and sort of one-man fourth estate — is up to the task. It helps that O’Rourke is one of the funniest and sharpest commentators of his generation. Not for naught is he allegedly the most cited living person in […]
Read MoreReadEasy, 12 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. You guys, I find that a lot of poetry lately? I don't understand it.(That felt good to get off my chest.)— Elizabeth Gilbert (@GilbertLiz) January 9, 2015 Watch the Golden Globes last night? Check out reviews we wrote of winners Boyhood (Best Motion Picture — Drama; Best Director — Richard Linklater; Best Supporting Actress — Patricia Arquette), Whiplash (Best Supporting Actor — JK Simmons), and Leviathan (Best Foreign Language Film). With more than a faint whiff of WikiLeaks and Anonymous, the Australian writer Peter Carey‘s new novel, Amnesia (Knopf, 2015), is the story of a leftwing journalist investigating a hacker whose computer virus has compromised the security of prisons in Australia and the US. In this interview with NPR, Carey discusses Julian Assange (“[he] really was the reason I started writing the book, but I didn’t want to write about Assange”), Facebook (“the naked playground”), and the attack this week on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (“sickened, afraid, really aware of the nature of the perilous conflicts in the modern world, in big multinational capitals…”). Carey’s other work […]
Read MoreFilms To See In January: Leviathan; Ida; Two Days, One Night
As awards season looms, with its predictable bows to prestige and heritage movies, three reasons to venture down the road less traveled by. Leviathan has been receiving messianic reviews since its premiere at Cannes last year, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and by the end of its two-and-a-half-some hours it’s easy to see why. I have an undeveloped theory that so-called “foreign” films do well in direct proportion to their correspondence with national stereotypes. With a land dispute, a visiting lawyer from Moscow, sublime landscapes, political corruption, and titanic quantities of vodka on display, you could say that Russia’s submission to the 87th Annual Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film ticks all the boxes. But Leviathan, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, is also a serious film of grand scope and ambition that deserves to be seen both in and out of the context of Putin’s Russia. At the outset, Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) is locked in a dense legal battle against local mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) over a plot of land his family has lived on for generations. Eventually shanghaied out of the property by corrupt officials, and cuckolded by the lawyer friend (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) he’d called on to […]
Read MoreReadEasy, 5 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. Meet the new year, same as the old year. Wouldn't it be nice to go a month or two w/o anything too horrible happening?— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 31, 2014 Dan Chiasson on Marlon Brando… “Anyone who has tried to recapture the magic of a joke by retelling it has felt, in miniature, what Brando must have felt in his career.” So writes Dan Chiasson in a deft summary of what made Marlon Brando great, and then kinda not so great, in this week’s New York Review of Books. He’s writing about Susan L. Mizruchi‘s new book, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Norton, 2014), which excavates some pretty entertaining factoids along the way. Did you know that Brando was the favorite actor of the National Theater for the Deaf? “They always understood exactly what he was expressing,” writes Mizruchi. Her book, Chiasson proclaims, “is a gallant attempt to rescue Brando from the spectacle of his late career[, which was in turn] a test of whether his greatness could survive the most ingenious forms of sabotage he could […]
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