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Author Lili Anolik thinks that readers have gotten Joan Didion all wrong.

In a piece in Vanity Fair this month, she argues that Didion’s rise as an icon is “not just wrong, egregiously wrong, wrong to the point of blasphemy.” Check it out:

I’m talking about the canonization of Didion, Didion as St. Joan, Didion as Our Mother of Sorrows. Didion is not, let me repeat, not a holy figure, nor is she a maternal one. She’s cool-eyed and cold-blooded, and that coolness and coldness—chilling, of course, but also bracing—is the source of her fascination as much as her artistry is; the source of her glamour too, and her seductiveness, because she is seductive, deeply. What she is is a femme fatale, and irresistible. She’s our kiss of death, yet we open our mouths, kiss back.

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Carmen Balcells, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary agent who sold his classic title One Hundred Years of Solitude, passed away this past September.

Before she died, she did one final interview with Vanity Fair in which she spoke frankly about her career. In the interview she explains discovering the work and selling it to Harper & Row. Here is an excerpt:

I was reading García Márquez—one of the early books—and I said to Luis, ‘This is so fantastic, Luis, that we have to read it at the same time.’ So I made a copy of it. We both had enthusiasm for it: it was so fresh, so original, so exciting. Every reader says in his mind, of certain books, ‘This is one of the best books I have ever read.’ When that happens to a book again and again, all over the world, you have a masterpiece. That is what happened with Gabriel García Márquez

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In 2012, author and editor Kevin Sessums shared a post that his old colleague from Vanity Fair George Hodgman had written from his hometown of Paris, Missouri, where he was caring for his mother, Betty.

Sessums introduced it, in part, by saying: \"His missives here on Facebook about his time back home with her are so beautiful. I had to share this latest one… (they) resound with such love and respect and a kind of sweet regret.\"

Portions of the story in that missive appear in Hodgman’s new book Bettyville, which will debut at #9 on the New York Times bestseller list next Sunday. Hodgman–a noted book and magazine editor who has worked at Simon and Schuster, Vanity Fair, Talk magazine, Henry Holt and Company, and Houghton Mifflin–announced it on his Facebook blog on March 18: \"This is a total thrill and unexpected. I wanted to post this here because I truly owe it to all of you. YOU MADE THIS BOOK FOR ME.\"

Writing in the New York Times, Cathy Horyn calls Bettyville, \"a most remarkable, laugh-out-loud book\" that \"works on several levels (as a meditation on belonging, as a story of growing up gay and the psychic cost of silence, as metaphor for recovery).\" When Horyn notes that he approaches memoir from a \"fairly new perspective: that of a gay son,\" Hodgman says, \"Here was this neurotic, self-centered, New York, childless gay man.\"

Horyn quotes Sara Bershtel, publisher of Metropolitan Books and a Hodgman colleague from his time at Henry Holt, who said, Bettyville suggests \"the development of a watchful gay kid. You have to watch everybody, you have to watch your parents, and you can’t show anything.\" Horyn feels that watchfulness \"made him a shrewd and witty observer.”

Hodgman told the Times that he generally wrote from 4 to 9 a.m., when his mother rose. Sometimes he would key in their chats while his mother spoke from the sofa.

\"My mother is funny and dry without knowing that she is. Together, we can make people laugh. So I had this idea of a quirky comedy team…I’m also very nostalgic about these towns…I just felt that this rural area was a real story that nobody was telling.\"

People are listening. In January, Publishers Lunch had already flagged it as a book to watch in its BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Spring/Summer edition. Amazon and Books-a-Million recently made Bettyville a Top Pick, and People named it a \"Book of the Week.\"

\"I am a believer in God in my own special way. But I think I was given this book because I came back.\"

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Even Steven Spielberg can get a rejection letter. It seems that Daniel Day-Lewis—who plays Lincoln in Spielberg’s presidential Academy Award Dominated movie, originally did not want to play Abraham Lincoln. Spielberg didn’t let the rejection letter go to waste, he stowed it away for safekeeping and the letter showed up at the awards-podium as reading material last week.

Julie Miller reporter for Vanity Fair wrote, “Before presenting Day-Lewis with the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor, Speilberg read aloud the Oscar winner’s thoughtful brush-off.”

Here is Steven’s Rejection Letter:

Dear Steven,

It was a real pleasure just to sit and talk with you. I listened very carefully to what you had to say about this compelling history, and I’ve since read the script and found it in all the detail in which it describe these monumental events and in the compassionate portraits of all the principal characters, both powerful and moving. I can’t account for how at any given moment I feel the need to explore life as opposed to another, but I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice; that a subject coincides inexplicably with a very personal need and a very specific moment in time. In this case, as fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant. That’s how I feel now in spite of myself, and though I can’t be sure that this won’t change, I couldn’t dream of encouraging you to keep it open on a mere possibility. I do hope this makes sense Steven, I’m glad you’re making the film, I wish you the strength for it, and I send both my very best wishes and my sincere gratitude to you for having considered me.

Daniel Day-Lewis

What can we learn from this? Well, Spielberg didn’t give up. After receiving the letter, he recruited Tony Kushner to pen a new screenplay from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals—one that would earn Day-Lewis’s approval. Apparently he did, because Lincoln is positioned to run away with the Oscars in February.

So the next time you get a rejection letter, keep this story in mind and revise your manuscript. Revision does improve our work and sometimes we just need someone to pull our best out of us.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

Filed under: News, rejection, revisions, success Tagged: Daniel Day Lewis, New York Film Critics Circle Award, Steven Spielberg, Team of Rivals, Tony Kushner, Vanity Fair

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Friends, including Stephen Fry, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, will gather on Friday to pay tribute to Christopher Hitchens, the author and columnist who died in December.

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By John Sutherland

We can never know the Victorians as well as they knew themselves. Nor–however well we annotate our texts–can we read Victorian novels as responsively as Victorians read them. They, not we, own their fiction. Thackeray and his original readers shared a common ground so familiar that there was no need for it to be spelled out. The challenge for the modern reader is to reconstruct that background as fully as we can. To ‘Victorianize’ ourselves, one might say.

It goes beyond stripping out the furniture of everyday life (horses not motorised transport, no running hot water, rampant infectious diseases) into attitudes. Can we—to take one troublesome example—in reading, say, Vanity Fair, ‘Victorianize’ our contemporary feelings about race? Or should we accept the jolt that overt 19^th-century racism gives the modern reader, take it on board, and analyse what lies behind it?

It crops up in the very opening pages of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s first full-page illustration in the novel shows the coach carrying Amelia and Becky (she hurling her Johnson’s ‘Dixonary’ out of the window) from Miss Pinkerton’s to the freedom of Russell Square. Free, free at last. Looked at closely, we may also note a black footman riding postilion in the Sedley coach. He is, we later learn, called Sambo. He features a couple of times in the first numbers and his presence hints, obliquely, that the slave trade is one field of business that the two rich merchants, Mr Sedley and Mr Osborne, may have made money from. The trade was, of course, abolished by Wilberforce’s act in 1805, but slaves continued to work in the British West Indies on the sugar plantations until the 1830s. The opening chapters of Vanity Fair are set in 1813.

When we first encounter George Osborne and Dobbin, they are just back from the West Indies. What was their regiment doing? Protecting the British interest in sugar cane production in the Caribbean possessions of the Crown (it is, incidentally, the same crop which enriches Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre and the Bertram family in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; the English were addicted to sugar in their tea and cakes).

There is another character in the novel with an interest in the West Indies. Amelia’s and Becky’s schoolmate at Miss Pinkerton’s academy, Miss Swartz, is introduced as the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s.’ St. Kitt’s, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean, had (until well into the twentieth century) a monoculture economy based on one crop, sugar. The plantations were worked, until the mid-1830s, by slaves–of whom Miss Swartz’s mother must have been one. Dobbin’s and George’s regiment, the ‘—-th,’ has recently been garrisoned at St. Kitts just before we encounter them. One of their duties would be to put down the occasional slave rebellions.

Miss Swartz is, we deduce, the daughter of a sugar merchant (the name hints at Jewish paternity) who has consoled himself with a black concubine. This was normal practice. It was also something painfully familiar to Thackeray. His father had been a high-ranking official in the East India Company. Thackeray, we recall, was born in Calcutta and educated himself on money earned in India. Before marrying, Thackeray’s father, as was normal, had a ‘native’ mistress and by her an illegitimate daughter, Sarah Blechynden. It was an embarrassment to the novelist, who declined any relationship with his half-sister in later life. In the truly hideous depiction Thackeray made of Miss Swartz (he illustrated his fiction, of course) in chapter 21 (‘Miss Swartz Rehearsing for the Drawing-Room’) one may suspect spite and an element of sham

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All that talk about the movie industry being in trouble (seems to have vanished over the weekend with news that “Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” became the eighth movie ever to pass the $1 billion worldwide box office mark.... Read the rest of this post

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I read the Robert Pattinson profile in Vanity Fair.  I take note:  Of the prison that is fame.  Of the insecurity of the artistically ambitious.  Of the predicament of a nearly 25-year-old actor who has been engulfed by the Twilight surge and wants, more than anything, to know who he is and what he is actually made of. 

I decide that what I love most is RPlatz's restless quest for knowledge—reading, they say, some 20 books during the filming of Water for Elephants, none of those books, from what I can tell, easy:  Eat the Rich, Money, the Keith Richards autobiography, a book of David Foster Wallace essays.  To not be able to walk a street, sit at a bar, or relax behind a curtain without the accompanying throng of fans (even if, in his case, they most unilaterally love him)—that sounds like hell to me.  To escape inside a book or 20—he's no dummy, that RPlatz.

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I am powerless when it comes to intelligent conversation—utterly done in when two learned, well-lived, curious people go back and forth, talking craft, talking wanting (this need I have for real conversation renders me pretty useless at most cocktail parties, I confess, an utter bore).  Conversation is what we get in the January 2011 issue of Vanity Fair—Patti Smith (and you know that I loved her memoir) interviewing Johnny Depp (who needs to say more?).

Look at how far afield from the traditional celebrity interview this goes. Look at what Hollywood mashing with Rock and Roll can be:

Smith:  When you spouted a few lines of poetry to Samantha Morton, who played Elizabeth Barry in the movie—that was my introduction to Wilmot's work, to his poetry.  And I noticed in Alice, when the Hatter recites, "Jabberwocky," that you have a gift for giving us the full measure of a poet's work. It is really quite difficult. Could you imagine doing a recording of works of poetry?

Depp:  I don't know.  It's daunting, because you don't know exactly... I mean, you can decipher the intent, and you can kind of swim around in the guts of it, but you just don't know how the poet would have wanted it read.

Smith:  Yes, but that's no different than Glenn Gould having to anticipate how Bach would want his work played.  I thought the Hatter's reading of "Jabberwocky" was luminous.  Yesterday you read me a poem written by the Elephant Man.  I didn't know he wrote poetry.  The poem you recited was heartbreaking.  How did you come to find it?

Depp:  I made an appointment at the hospital where they had his remains....

 

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MTV updates logo (for the first time in 30 years, dropping the "Music television" tagline once and for all. Also Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley's joins 'Top Model' adding some extra couture cred to this season's judges panel) (WWD) - Teens... Read the rest of this post

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MTV updates logo (for the first time in 30 years, dropping the "Music television" tagline once and for all. Also Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley's joins 'Top Model' adding some extra couture cred to this season's judges panel) (WWD) - Teens... Read the rest of this post

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Remember that off-the-beaten-path, Mom and Pop restaurant that a friend of a friend told you about? Chances are it was the best meal of your life.

In support of life’s little known treasures, Fang Duff Kahn Publishers created the newest addition of their City Secrets series, Books: The Essential Insider’s Guide, a book to help you find those unsung books you might otherwise never discover.

Books: The Essential Insider’s Guide features book recommendations from an all-star lineup of authors, editors, and humorists, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Oscar Hijuelos and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. These fabulous in-the-know contributors present to you a list of underappreciated books from every genre imaginable: fiction, memoirs, and yes, even crime—writing. No more book store bumbling! No more bestseller boredom! A whole world of literary magic awaits you…

And now . . . (drumroll, please) . . . the best part!  For every copy of Books: The Essential Insider’s Guide sold, Fang Duff Kahn will donate 2% of the purchase price to First Book, and help put a book directly in the hands of a child in need.

Okay, so I just might have drumrolled too early, because I forgot to mention the other best part: our Books for Books Blog Contest!  By participating in our blog contest, you can help get even more books to kids and inspire little readers everywhere. Here’s how it works:

1. Respond to this blog post between November 12th and December 1st by answering “What is your favorite overlooked book?”
2. Then, link this blog to Twitter, Facebook, send it over listservs, tell your friends (and maybe even your enemies too) because . . . if we can reach 250 comments, then Fang Duff Kahn Publishers will donate 500 BOOKS, to the kids that need them most.
3. Still not convinced? The person who posts the most overlooked book will win their very own copy of Books: The Essential Insider’s Guide. On December 1st we will announce the lucky winner right here on the First Book Blog.

“But,” you say, “I don’t have a favorite almost forgotten, underappreciated book!” Well, that’s okay (although if that is true you should highly consider buying Books: The Essential Insider’s Guide)! You can feel free to talk about your favorite, better known book as well.

So don’t even think about clicking that back button on your browser!  Help children in need experience the magic of their very first book!

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Remembering Ted Kennedy, America’s Eulogist
Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum remembers Senator Ted Kennedy as America’s “unofficial eulogist laureate.”

Frustrated Novelist Julia Child Finally Tops Bestseller List
Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking debuts at number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week.

Lemony Snicket Threatens a ‘Dreadful’ New Series
The Guardian features a humorous article announcing that “elusive author Lemony Snicket (aka author Daniel Handler) is working on a four-book series as a follow-up to the bestselling A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

Apple joins with Publisher to put First Picture Book on iPhone
The UK’s Winged Chariot Press is the first publisher to offer a children’s picture book for the iPhone, publishing The Surprise by Sylvia van Ommen.

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How dare Vanity Fair print such a cruel and heartless article about Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The New York Times? How can a man possibly summon the energy and enthusiasm to get out of bed, get dressed and face the... Read the rest of this post

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