“One thing my friends live in constant fear of is that I’ll put them in a book,” Pat Conroy tells Kathy Patrick, host of Beauty and the Book. “My enemies have a real reason to fear that I’ll put them in a book because I always do. And if they were mean to me when I was a teenage kid I give them the worst case of acne in the history of skin. In South of Broad, everyone is based on someone I know. [But] usually they’re based on people I love, and people I know very well, and people I want to celebrate.” Watch the video after the jump.
Read more ›Luminous and intensely personal, Art and Madness recounts the lost years of Anne Roiphe’s twenties, when the soon-to-be-critically-acclaimed author put her dreams of becoming a writer on hold to devote herself to the magnetic but coercive male artists of the period. In vivid prose, Roiphe captures the ‘50s and ‘60s as an era when art and alcohol and rebellion caused collateral damage and sometimes produced extraordinary work.
Read more ›Luminous and intensely personal, Art and Madness (on sale March 15) recounts the lost years of Anne Roiphe’s twenties, when the soon-to-be-critically-acclaimed author put her dreams of becoming a writer on hold to devote herself to the magnetic but coercive male artists of the period. Sign up for the Nan A. Talese newsletter for your chance to win a signed copy!
Read more ›Did Jackie take agent lunches? Which books did she commission, and why? What was she like around the office? Author William Kuhn answered these questions and more during his presentation at the Boston Athenaeum on February 8, 2011, recorded by BookTV. Click here to watch.
Read more ›In a revealing Q&A, acclaimed memoirist Mark Richard discusses the stigma of being born a “special child,” his career in television, the proclivities of Southern writers, and the conditions under which he writes best.
Read more ›In a WSJ essay Anne Roiphe recounts the decade during which she put her dreams of becoming a writer on hold to devote herself to the magnetic but coercive male artists of the period. “Once upon a time the stars of the book review section were roaming wild in the wee hours of the night, like so many dinosaurs in the forests primeval.” Her memoir Art and Madness goes on sale March 15.
Read more ›Ian McEwan recently accepted the Jerusalem prize for literature, an honor awarded biennially to writers whose work deals with themes of individual freedom in society. The first winner in 1963 was the philosopher Bertrand Russell and other recipients include Simone de Beauvoir, JM Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa.
On February 20, 2011, Ian McEwan gave an acceptance speech during the award ceremony. The text of this speech is after the jump.
Read more ›How do you write a memoir without using “I”? Allow the brilliant author Mark Richard to show you how it’s done. As a young man, Richard, defying both his doctors […]
Read more ›Jacqueline Bouvier wrote about her ambition to be something “more than a housewife” in her boarding school yearbook. She got her wish, and then some, after the death of Aristotle Onassis, when she was hired as a book editor, a role she enjoyed for nearly twenty years. William Kuhn reveals the professional side of the former first lady in his “intelligently dishy” (The Boston Globe) book Reading Jackie, which he discusses after the jump on WGBH’s “Greater Boston.” As Kuhn tells it, “The overwhelming majority of the authors Jackie worked with and her colleagues remember her being much less grand than they expected her to be.”
Read more ›The book blogger Cyberlibrarian turns her attention this week toward John Pipkin‘s debut Woodsburner, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, recommending it to fans of Henry David Thoreau and those who enjoy character driven fiction. Read her full post here.
Read more ›