Decadent U.
The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College
Fall, 1982. A new freshman class arrives at arty, louche, and expensive Bennington College. Among the druggies, rebels, heirs, and posers: future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem. What happened over the next four years would spark scandal, myth, and some of the authors’ greatest novels. Return to a campus and an era like no other.
BY LILI ANOLIK
Ian Gittler (Ellis).
What Café du Dôme was to the Lost Generation, the dining hall at Bennington College was to Generation X—i.e., the Lost Generation Revisited. The Moveable Feast had moved ahead six decades and across the Atlantic, and while, of course, southwestern Vermont wasn’t Paris, somehow, in the early-to-mid eighties, it was, was just as sly, louche, low-down, and darkly perdu. And speaking of sly, louche, low-down, and darkly perdu, check out the habitués. Seated around the table, ready to gorge on the conversation if not the food (cocaine, the Pernod of its era, is a notorious appetite suppressant), berets swapped for sunglasses, were the neo F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Djuna Barnes: Bret Easton Ellis, future writer of American Psycho and charter member of the literary Brat Pack; Jonathan Lethem, future writer of The Fortress of Solitude and MacArthur genius; and Donna Tartt, future writer of The Secret History and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch. All three were in the class of 1986. All three were a long way from home—Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Grenada, Mississippi, respectively. All three were, at various times, infatuated and disappointed with one another, their friendships stimulated and fueled by rivalry. And all three would mythologize Bennington—the baroque wickedness, the malignant glamour, the corruption so profound as to be exactly what is meant by the word decadence—in their fiction that, as it turns out, wasn’t quite, and thereby become myths themselves.
Every prodigy needs his or her very own Gertrude Stein or Sherwood Anderson—i.e., a mentor and model. Bennington had those in profusion, teachers who were also artists: journalist Joe McGinniss; novelists and short-story writers Nicholas Delbanco and Arturo Vivante; and poet, mystic, and self-chronicler Claude Fredericks. And then there were the supporting figures (and fellow students), so fascinating they threatened to eclipse the main: writers Jill Eisenstadt, David Lipsky, Lawrence David, Reginald Shepherd; Brixton Smith Start, lead guitarist of post-punk British band the Fall; and Quintana Roo Dunne, only child of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.
So grab a tray, pull up a chair, and try not to look like you’re eavesdropping.
Naked Bookseller Gone
Quartzsite’s ‘Naked Bookseller’ Paul Winer dies
By John Gutekunst and Brandon Bowers
Long-time Quartzsite resident Paul Winer died the evening of May 7 at his home. He was 75 years old.
Winer was best known as the owner of Reader’s Oasis Books in Quartzsite, where he gained notoriety as the “naked bookseller.” He was also a professional entertainer and musician. He was even an artist, drawing a comic strip on local events entitled “As the Crow Flies.”
Long-time Quartzsite resident Paul Winer died the evening of May 7 at his home. He was 75 years old.
Winer was best known as the owner of Reader’s Oasis Books in Quartzsite, where he gained notoriety as the “naked bookseller.” He was also a professional entertainer and musician. He was even an artist, drawing a comic strip on local events entitled “As the Crow Flies.”
Robot Authors
The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?
Artificial intelligence can now write fiction and journalism. But does it measure up to George Orwell – and can it report on Brexit?
by Steven Poole
Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild, because it could be employed to create “deepfakes for text”. “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” they said, “we are not releasing the trained model.” Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?
Let’s first take a step back. AI has been the next big thing for so long that it’s easy to assume “artificial intelligence” now exists. It doesn’t, if by “intelligence” we mean what we sometimes encounter in our fellow humans. GPT2 is just using methods of statistical analysis, trained on huge amounts of human-written text – 40GB of web pages, in this case, that received recommendations from Reddit readers – to predict what ought to come next. This probabilistic approach is how Google Translate works, and also the method behind Gmail’s automatic replies (“OK.” “See you then.” “That’s fine!”) It can be eerily good, but it is not as intelligent as, say, a bee.
Right now, novelists don’t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – the machine continued the narrative as follows: “I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.”
Books Are Alive!
Stop Saying Books Are Dead. They’re More Alive Than Ever
BY LISA LUCAS
Lisa Lucas is the executive director of the National Book Foundation, the presenter of the National Book Awards and a non-profit that celebrates the best literature in America, expands its audience, and ensures that books have a prominent place in American culture
“The book is dead,” is a refrain I hear constantly. I’ll run into people on the subway, in a taxi, in an airport, or wherever I might be and when I tell them what I do, they ask me “do people even still read anymore?” This simple question implies the very work I do at the National Book Foundation may not be worthwhile—or even possible. It’s generally a casual statement, a throwaway remark, a comment repeated so often that it’s taken as fact. The book is obviously dead, or at least dying, right?
False. When people tell me that fighting for books is fighting a futile battle, that’s the moment my optimism kicks in. That’s the moment I power up my very deepest belief in literature. A person who wants to challenge or lament the death of reading with me is a person looking for a fight and, I think, a person who wants to be convinced otherwise. This gives me hope. I’m here for this fight.
Emma Roberts Reads KATERINA
Emma Roberts Is All Smiles After Purchasing James Frey’s ‘Katerina’ in LA!
Emma Roberts has some holiday reading in store!
The 27-year-old American Horror Storyactress was spotted heading out after purchasing a copy of James Frey‘s Katerina on Wednesday (December 26) in Los Angeles.
The novel, released earlier in 2018, is described as a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018.
Great Expectations
THE ‘FUTURE BOOK’ IS HERE, BUT IT’S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED
by
HOTLITTLEPOTATO; GETTY IMAGES
THE FUTURE BOOK was meant to be interactive, moving, alive. Its pages were supposed to be lush with whirling doodads, responsive, hands-on. The old paperback Zork choose-your-own-adventures were just the start. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would incorporate your very environment into its story—the name of the coffee shop you were sitting at, your best friend’s birthday. It would be sly, maybe a little creepy. Definitely programmable. Ulysses would extend indefinitely in any direction you wanted to explore; just tap and some unique, mega-mind-blowing sui generis path of Joycean machine-learned words would wend itself out before your very eyes.
Prognostications about how technology would affect the form of paper books have been with us for centuries. Each new medium was poised to deform or murder the book: newspapers, photography, radio, movies, television, videogames, the internet.
Some viewed the intersection of books and technology more positively: In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote in The Atlantic: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”
Researcher Alan Kay created a cardboard prototype of a tablet-like device in 1968. He called it the “Dynabook,” saying, “We created a new kind of medium for boosting human thought, for amplifying human intellectual endeavor. We thought it could be as significant as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 500 years ago.”
GMA: KATERINA on Best Books of 2018 List
from ABC News/Good Morning America
Best books of 2018 make great gifts for the holidays
By TONY MORRISON & ALISON EHRLICH via GMA
GMA, ABC News Photo Illustration
A perfectly selected book as a gift for the holidays can make you the most thoughtful of gift-givers.
Whether you’re looking for something new to pick up for yourself or stumped by what to get that very special bookworm in your life, check out our list of best reads of 2018. It’s curated by our “GMA” Book Editor, including what we just can’t wait to get our hands on in the New Year.
“The Kiss Quotient,” by Helen Hoang
“Sadie,” by Courtney Summers
“Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” by John Carreyrou
“Katerina,” by James Frey
KATERINA on New York Post Must-read List
This week’s must-read books
Katerina
James Frey (Gallery/Scout Press)
Set in 1992 Paris and 2018 Los Angeles, a love story between a young writer and a young model, both on the verge of fame. Twenty-five years later, the writer receives an anonymous message that draws him back to that relationship and all the magic of that earlier time.
GAWKER Alive
Gawker Set to Relaunch Under New Owner Bryan Goldberg (EXCLUSIVE)
Amanda Hale hired as publisher for new iteration of the media gossip blog
Gawker will rise from the ashes in a new iteration of the website to be launched next year, Variety has learned.
The reborn Gawker comes under the ownership of Bryan Goldberg, founder and CEO of Bustle Digital Group, who was the winning bidder for the remaining assets of Gawker Media in July. Goldberg paid $1.35 million for the media gossip blog, which has been dormant for over two years after Gawker Media was sued into bankruptcy by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
In a memo to Bustle staff Tuesday obtained by Variety, Goldberg said he has hired Amanda Hale as the new publisher of Gawker. Based in New York, Hale most recently was chief revenue officer of The Outline, the culture website founded by Joshua Topolsky (who previously worked at Bloomberg Media and The Verge) that recently laid off one-fourth of its staff.
Goldberg is targeting the Gawker relaunch for early 2019. “We won’t recreate Gawker exactly as it was, but we will build upon Gawker’s legacy and triumphs — and learn from its missteps,” he wrote in the memo. “In so doing, we aim to create something new, vibrant, highly relevant, and worth visiting daily.”
Sam Taylor-Johnson on A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
Sam Taylor-Johnson on “the Dream” of Directing Husband Aaron in A Million Little Pieces
The adaptation of James Frey’s book—debuting at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday—is the couple’s first collaboration since Nowhere Boy.
by JULIE MILLER
.jpg)
Jeff Gros
Since making 2009’s brilliant John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson had been looking for an excuse to work together again.
But their personal collaborations complicated reunion possibilities for several years. Sam and Aaron fell in love after making the movie, got married, and had two daughters. (Sam also has two older daughters from her first marriage.) Rather than leave the kids in the care of strangers, husband and wife took turns making movies—with Sam adapting E.L. James’s bodice-ripping best-seller Fifty Shades of Grey into an artful blockbuster; and Aaron cycling through genres in Anna Karenina,Godzilla, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Nocturnal Animals.
Last year, though, the stars finally re-aligned for the Taylor-Johnsons. Sam signed on to direct an adaptation of James Frey’s 2003 book, A Million Little Pieces. And Aaron coincidentally had a gap in his schedule.
“The minute I knew he was available, it was clear that Aaron would be James. Absolutely, without question,” Sam said in an interview ahead of A Million Little Pieces’ premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. “I think it was serendipitous timing that he was available, the book rights were available, and the timing was perfect. . . . This was the dream since we first worked together. After [Nowhere Boy], we would both go to work on different projects, and I’d say, in my mind, ‘I’m leaving the best actor at home.’”
Stay gold, Ponyboy
The Enduring Spell of ‘The Outsiders’
S. E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age novel credited teenagers with a rich interior life. Here, a tribute to the book that created young adult fiction as we know it today.
By Lena Dunham
IT WAS FRESHMAN year of college and I fancied myself someone, well, fancy. Someone who loved fancy books and fancy men. Fancy bags and fancy restaurants. I was working overtime to appear unfazed, and it was moving along about as smoothly as the Sochi Olympics. Across the Intro to Genealogy classroom sat a boy who looked like a man but was, by virtue of being 19, still a boy — dark hair and dark eyes, a denim jacket so stiff it looked starched. He barely spoke but knew all the answers, while I spoke all the time and knew none.
I was leaving in the spring, transferring to a school that my mother considered more “academically rigorous,” and it was my soon-to-be-outta-here sense of abandon that allowed me to approach him one day after class: “Hey, did you know you look like the lead singer of the Cure?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Who’s that?” he asked. I stuttered — the fact was, I didn’t actually know. I’d seen a photo of Robert Smith in another kid’s dorm room and wasn’t expecting to be questioned, but instead to receive the kind of insider approval that usually accompanied a display of hipster knowledge. (This was the privilege of not having to consider the consequences of any action, great or small, that is endemic to upper-middle-class white girls everywhere.) I stammered: “Your hair is … I mean, your faces both kind of look …” He stared.
I changed tactics.
“I’m transferring,” I haughtily informed him.
“Oh, are you?” He jutted his chin out toward me: “O.K., then … stay gold, Ponyboy.”
Best Books of 2018: KATERINA by JAMES FREY
The Best Books of 2018 (So Far)
Get your to-read list ready: 2018 is already a good year for reading.
We may live in challenging times, and there’s no better escape than through a good book. From new novels from beloved writers to compelling non-fiction examinations of our modern world, 2018 has already delivered some excellent reads.
Would you respond to a cryptic Facebook message from an unrecognized user? Forty-two-year-old novelist-turned-screenwriter Jay does. He’s ambivalent about the messages at first, but their familiar tone piques his interest and reminds him of someone important from his past. Thus, begins this sexy and electric novel that flips between modern-day Los Angeles and Paris in 1992—back when Jay was 21 and burning with the desire to make art that was going to change the world. Frey, perhaps best known for his controversial book A Million Little Pieces, has penned a compulsive novel that speaks directly to the scandal that blew up his own life.
CLICK TO BUY KATERINA on Amazon
[ click to read the rest of the Best 2018 Books at Esquire ]
KATERINA Tour Schedule
My first tour in awhile – looking forward to seeing you all again….
Click here to pick up a copy of KATERINA – bring it to a reading and I’ll sign it for you.
James Frey Reads from KATERINA in New Canaan
Authors @ New Canaan Library Presents James Frey, Introducing New Novel, Katerina
by Katherine Blance
New Canaan Library welcomes bestselling author James Frey, speaking about his latest novel, Katerina, on Wednesday, September 26 at 6:30 p.m. in the Adrian Lamb Room. Copies of the book will be available for purchase, courtesy of Elm Street Books. Please register online at newcanaanlibrary.org.
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning comes Katerina, James Frey’s highly anticipated new novel. Set in both 1992 Paris and contemporary Los Angeles, Katerina tells the story of a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame in 1992, both reckless, impulsive, and deeply in love. Twenty-five years later, the writer is rich and famous and numb – until he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly to the love, he abandoned years prior.
James Frey is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He is the bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. He is married and lives in Connecticut.
Easton Ellis on Cultural Relevance
Bret Easton Ellis on Podcasts, Politics and How His Dark Satire Predicted Trump’s America
“If there is a sense of cultural irrelevance hovering around me, that’s fine,” says the screenwriter and novelist behind ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Less Than Zero’
By DREW FORTUNE
Over the past three decades, novelist Bret Easton Ellis has dealt in ultraviolence, casual nihilism and the skewering of America’s superficialities. With his last book, Imperial Bedrooms approaching its 10-year anniversary, it began to seem that Ellis was spinning his wheels. With several savagely reviewed screenwriting ventures in recent years — the 2013 Lindsay Lohan/James Deen erotic thriller The Canyons didn’t exactly set the world on fire — the Bret Easton Ellis brand might not hold as much commercial clout as it once did. However, in his 54th year, Ellis is happy. American Psycho has become a millennial touchstone and the pilot for Less Than Zero — a proposed 10-part miniseries for Hulu based on Ellis’s first book — just wrapped. With age came calm, but the man who birthed Patrick Bateman still has the ability to royally piss people off.
After decades of playing possum with his homosexuality in the media and on the page — in his 2005 semi-autobiographical novel Lunar Park, the main character is married with kids — Ellis has reached a place where his identity, politics and worldview are an open forum. The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, which debuted in 2013 with guest Kanye West, has been a soapbox for the Literary Brat-Packer to rant about whatever is on his mind, from film and music, to pop culture and politics. This year, Ellis took the podcast to Patreon, a subscription service that charges Ellis fans $1.50 per episode, or $10 a month for a membership where users can participate in Q&As with Ellis and his guests. In a time where paid podcasts are mostly viewed as a fool’s venture, Ellis sees it as an experiment in action — albeit one that might not be working out as great as he envisioned.
Catching up with Ellis from his Beverly Hills home, we discussed fear, liberal loathing and why he’s not afraid to be culturally irrelevant.
Altered Books in Bisbee
from Sierra Vista Herald/Review
Giving old books new life: Bisbee preps for annual Altered Books Show and Auction
By Emily Ellis
BISBEE — In the age of tablets and smartphones, hard copies of books have become a thing of the past for many — something to stuff in a closet or toss in the dumpster.
But in Bisbee, artists are giving such forgotten books the star treatment.
Bisbee’s annual Altered Books Show and Silent Auction, a Friends of the Copper Queen Library fundraiser, returns to town this month for its eighth year. The event showcases works of art made from books that are auctioned off to raise funds for the library. Anyone can submit an art piece for the auction, which have ranged from lamps sculpted to resemble famous literary characters to dresses made of book pages in the past, said library program coordinator Alison Williams.
“To me, even before I worked at the library, it is the best art show in Bisbee,” she said. “A variety of artists build these amazing things. ”
James Frey to CAA – A MILLION LITTLE PIECES to Festivals
CAA Signs James Frey As Sam & Aaron Taylor-Johnson Ready ‘A Million Little Pieces’ Film For Fall Festivals
REX/Shutterstock
EXCLUSIVE: CAA just signed best-selling author James Frey. This comes as Brad Weston’s Makeready and The Picture Company prepare to launch A Million Little Pieces, the screen version of the semi-autobiographical and controversial addiction novel that was adapted into a feature by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the latter of whom directed her husband in the lead role. The film, which also stars Billy Bob Thornton, Giovanni Ribisi and Odessa Young (Assassination Nation), will be launched as an acquisition title in the fall festivals.
[ click to continue reading at Deadline ]
Amascammers
Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback
SAN FRANCISCO — Many booksellers on Amazon strive to sell their wares as cheaply as possible. That, after all, is usually how you make a sale in a competitive marketplace.
Other merchants favor a counterintuitive approach: Mark the price up to the moon.
“Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed.
“How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?” Ms. Macgillivray wrote in an email. She noted that her blog had gotten an explosion in traffic from Russia. “Maybe Russian hackers do this in their spare time, making money on the side,” she said.
Racy KATERINA Billboard Rejected by Javitz Center
from The San Francisco Chronicle
Publishers embrace, and ponder, audiobooks’ rise
NEW YORK (AP) — As the audiobook market continues to boom, publishers find themselves both grateful and concerned.
The industry gathered over the past week for BookExpo and the fan-based BookCon, which ended Sunday at the Jacob Javits center in Manhattan. The consensus, as it has been for the past few years, is of a stable overall market: physical books rising, e-book sales soft and audio, led by downloaded works, expanding by double digits.
…Conventiongoers lined up to meet Sally Field, Tony Kushner and Charlaine Harris, among others. They also stood (and sat) patiently for the once-notorious James Frey, whose “Katerina” will be publushed this fall by Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint.
A decade ago, Frey’s addiction memoir “A Million Little Pieces” was revealed as being extensively fabricated and the author himself was chewed out on television by Oprah Winfrey, but not before her initial endorsement had helped the book sell millions. But Winfrey and Frey later reconciled, Frey now openly writes fiction and Gallery is openly promoting his old work, whether billing “Katerina” as “Written in the same percussive, propulsive, dazzling, breathtaking style as ‘A Million Little Pieces'” or highlighting the memoir in a billboard ad for his new novel.
“‘A Million Little Pieces’ is a beloved and brilliant book, regardless of the controversy, so we did not think twice about using it in our advertising,” Gallery spokeswoman Jennifer Robinson said.
But one change was made for the convention.
“The Javits Center did reject our first design for the billboard as it showed a bit too much flesh,” Robinson said. “We had to make a little less of ‘Katerina’ visible.”
Iconic Book Covers
16 iconic book covers
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
Rodrigo Corral is the creative mind behind the cover for James Frey’s novel about a recovering addict. Inspired by some cupcakes he saw at a bakery in NYC, Corral wanted to imagine how addiciton would look like running “through the human body.” The cover has become one of the most recognizable in recent years.
Get it here.
KATERINA UK
New James Frey novel from John Murray
by Katherine Cowdrey
James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces (John Murray), is publishing a new novel with John Murray called Katerina.
Katerina, pitched as a sweeping love story that alternates between 1992 Paris and 2017 Los Angeles, will be published in September this year. John Murray acquired UK and Commonwealth rights through Jenny Meyer of Jenny Meyer Literary Agency on behalf of Eric Simonoff at WME.
At the centre of the novel is protagonist Jay, who is 21 when he moves to Paris to live the artist’s life, and falls in love for the first time. Cut to 25 years later: he is a middle-age family man living in California when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years before.
North American rights have sold to Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, while the film rights to the book have been pre-emptively acquired by Makeready, the new production outfit launched in 2017 by former New Regency c.e.o Brad Weston. Frey will write the script and be executive producer. Guymon Casady is producing through Entertainment 360, the production arm of Management 360. WME negotiated the sale.
Goodbye, Graydon
GRAYDON CARTER RECALLS HIS FONDEST MEMORIES (AND TRICKS OF THE TRADE) FROM 25 YEARS ATOP VANITY FAIR
The author recounts the key to his longevity, and some of his greatest hits along the way.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
All good things—certainly in my case this month—eventually come to an end. This is my final issue of Vanity Fair. I won’t bore you with the details of my complex emotions right now, but I will say that being the editor of Vanity Fair may well be one of the most extraordinary professional experiences there is. I will have been here for more than a quarter of a century, which, in magazine years, is more than a few eternities. It’s 9,200 days of covering presidential terms (eight of them) and countless terrorist episodes, foreign wars, financial meltdowns, weather disasters, and societal upheavals. What have I left out? Oh yes, Washington scandals, Wall Street scandals, Hollywood scandals, Silicon Valley scandals, Westminster scandals, and Kremlin scandals. Plus Deep Throat and Caitlyn Jenner. I could go on. (On a more personal level, Vanity Fairpaid considerably better than my previous jobs, the result being that I had the wherewithal to afford to have more children, and was blessed with the addition of two daughters to the brood of three sons I had coming into the job.)
When I arrived at the magazine, Cheers, Murphy Brown, and Seinfeld were among the big television hits. George H. W. Bush was president and Bill Clinton would soon become the president-elect. It was the year that The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson went off the air. Taylor Swift was just out of diapers: she hadn’t even broken up with anyone yet—at least not to my knowledge. No one had heard of e-mail, and the Internet as we know it was still in the future. Back then I looked like one of the male assistants here now—clear eyes, dark hair, and a waist smaller than a yardstick. As I leave, I gaze in the mirror and, save for the absence of a twinset and pearls, I see the Queen Mother.
The crumbling husk that lies before you aside, not a week went by when I didn’t mention to one or more of the staff I saw every day—Chris Garrett, Aimée Bell, Jane Sarkin, Beth Kseniak, Sara Marks—just what goddamn fun this all was. And how could it not have been? After an exhilarating life at Spy and a giddy, shoestring year at The New York Observer, being given the editorship of Vanity Fair was truly like being given the keys to an almost fictional magazine kingdom. Back in the day we didn’t even have budgets. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., our legendary proprietor, just said to spend what you needed. In the late 90s, we were having lunch and I told him that I had some good news and some bad news. He said, “What’s the bad news?” I told him that the Hollywood Issue cover we had just shot might well be the most expensive magazine cover ever. Si thought for a moment, then asked, “Well, what’s the good news?” I said it lookedlike the most expensive magazine cover ever. Only Si would have smiled at such news.
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES Casts Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi
Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri & Charlie Hunnam Join Aaron Taylor-Johnson In ‘A Million Little Pieces’
REX/Shutterstock/Nan A. Talese
EXCLUSIVE: A Million Little Pieces, the screen adaptation of the James Frey book, is fast assembling for a January 25 production start. Billy Bob Thornton has joined Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director Sam Taylor-Johnson for the first film to go into production for Brad Weston’s producing/financing company Makeready. Thornton will be joined by Carla Juri, who emerges from Blade Runner 2049 to play the female lead, and Charlie Hunnam. Giovanni Ribisi was already set. Makeready’s Pam Abdy is producing with The Picture Company partners Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman.
Thornton plays the role of Leonard, whom fans of Frey’s book will recall as a mysterious tough guy who became the guardian angel at a rehab facility for the protagonist, who tried to end his addiction problems before they killed him. Frey later wrote Leonard’s life story in a followup book.
Taylor-Johnson’s Take On “A Million Little Pieces”
Sam Taylor-Johnson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson to Tackle ‘A Million Little Pieces’ (Exclusive)
by
Mike Pont/WireImage/Sam Taylor-Johnson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
CAA has been negotiating the release of the rights of James Frey’s 2003 book from Warners, and the package is expected to be launched at the upcoming American Film Market.
The big-screen adaptation of James Frey’s best-seller A Million Little Pieces is being reassembled, this time as a team-up between husband-and-wife duo Aaron Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson.
The 2003 book was once one of the hottest properties in town but became radioactive after Frey was exposed for inventing or embellishing parts of the story that was originally dubbed a memoir. Warner Bros. won the book in a bidding war in 2003 and set it up with producer Brad Pitt and his then-Plan B partners Jennifer Aniston and Brad Grey. Frey wrote the first version of the screenplay.
Trans-Thrillers
Why Men Pretend to Be Women to Sell Thrillers
Over the last decade, female writers have come to dominate crime fiction, a genre traditionally associated with men. But their appeal goes beyond the byline.
Rafael Marchante / Reuters
Almost 10 years ago, Martyn Waites, a British crime writer, was having coffee with his editor. Waites, who was at something of a loose end project-wise, was looking for new ideas. His editor, though, was looking for a woman. Or, more specifically, a high-concept female thriller writer who could be the U.K.’s Karin Slaughter or Tess Gerritsen.
“I said I could do it,” Waites recalls. His editor was skeptical. But then Waites outlined an idea for a book based on a news story he’d once read, about a serial killer targeting pregnant women and cutting out their fetuses. The concept, he admits somewhat bashfully, was a gruesome one.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” was his editor’s response.
That idea became The Surrogate, a crime thriller published in 2009, and Waites simultaneously became Tania Carver, his female alter ego. Before he started writing, he embarked on a period of research, reading novels by popular female crime writers, and made “copious notes” about their various heroes and villains. Waites was an actor before he was a writer, and “Martyn” and “Tania” soon became different personas in his head, almost like characters. He’d sit down to write as Tania and then realize the concept was much better suited to Martyn. Martyn books, he explains, “were more complex, more metaphorical. The kind of things I like in writing.” Tania books were simpler: mainstream commercial thrillers aimed at a female audience. And they rapidly became more successful than any of Waites’s previous books had been.
The case of a male author using a female pseudonym to write fiction was relatively unheard of when Tania Carver emerged, but the explosion of female-oriented crime fiction in the last five years has led to an increasing number of male authors adopting gender-neutral names to publish their work. Last month, The Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Gamerman considered the phenomenon, interviewing a number of writers who fessed up to being men: Riley Sager (Todd Ritter), A.J. Finn (Daniel Mallory), S.J. Watson (Steve Watson), J.P. Delaney (Tony Strong), S.K. Tremayne (Sean Thomas). The trend is ironic, Gamerman pointed out, because the history of fiction is littered with women writers adopting male or gender-neutral pseudonyms to get their work published, from the Brontë sisters to J.K. Rowling.
Sam Shepard Gone
Broadway Will Dim The Lights For Sam Shepard
Ben Rothstein/Warner Bros./REX/Shutterstock
On Broadway, Shepard debuted with his contribution to the musical revue Oh! Calcutta! (1969) followed by Operation Sidewinder (1970), a revival of Oh! Calcutta!(1976), Buried Child (1996), True West (2000), and Fool for Love (2015). He received Tony Award nominations in 2000 for True West and 1996 for Buried Child, for which he had earlier been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“Sam Shepard was a prolific storyteller who created provocative, thoughtful, and exciting work for Broadway, off-Broadway, and film. His original voice was a definite draw for audiences and had an undeniable influence on other artists,” said Charlotte St. Martin, President of the Broadway League. “He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues.”
PREVIOUSLY with more information: Sam Shepard, whose snaggle-toothed smile, craggy good looks and outlaw style as actor and writer made him an American icon in the mold of Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando, died July 27 at home in Kentucky. He was 73 and had been suffering from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was surrounded by family at the time of his death, according to Chris Boneau, a family spokesman.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, author, screenwriter and director, Shepard was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff. The author of 44 plays, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for Buried Child and was best known for such works as Fool for Love, True West and A Lie of the Mind. In 2009 he was named the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist.
Is my husband gay, is my wife crazy?
Proof that Americans are lying about their sexual desires
What Google searches for porn tell us about ourselves.
by Sean Illing
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8753151/EverybodyLies_HC.JPG)
Two weeks ago, I interviewed Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies, a new book that uses data on America’s Google habits as an insight into our national consciousness.
Two findings from the book dominated the conversation: America is riddled with racist and selfish people, and there may be a self-induced abortion crisis in this country.
But there was plenty more revelatory data in the book that we didn’t cover. So I wanted to follow up with Stephens-Davidowitz to talk about some of the other provocative claims he is making.
I was particularly interested in sexuality and online porn. If, as Stephens-Davidowitz puts it, “Google is a digital truth serum,” then what else does it tell us about our private thoughts and desires? What else are we hiding from our friends, neighbors, and colleagues?
A lot, apparently.
Among other things, Stephens-Davidowitz’s data suggests that there are more gay men in the closet than we think; that many men prefer overweight women to skinny women but are afraid to act on it; that married women are disproportionately worried their husband is gay; that a lot of straight women watch lesbian porn; and that porn featuring violence against women is more popular among women than men.
I asked Stephens-Davidowitz to explain the data behind all of this. Here’s what he told me.
