My eagle-eyed friend John Connolly spotted this complimentary comment about Spy in, of all places, The Tube City Almanac of McKeesport, Pennsylvania: With My Little Eye: One of my purchases during the recent Book Country outing was a history of the late, lamented Spy magazine called Spy: The Funny Years. I started to page through …
This may come as some surprise, but even in these times, when it’s all the vogue to lose your job and all the trendsetters are competing to see whose net worth can drop the fastest, some people still want to be rich. If you’re one of them, you may learn something about how to get …
A highly eclectic, hardly systematic accounting of what I liked best in 2008: 1.) THE ELECTION. What a tremendous drama. The characters were strong and well-drawn–too-good-to-be-true Barack Obama, the redoubtable Hillary Clinton, the indomitable and gracious John McCain, and the brilliantly imagined Sarah Palin, among others–plus the well-plotted series of upsets and comebacks, culminating in …
For years, the financial writer Alice Schroeder had urged Warren Buffet to write his autobiography. Buffet continually demurred, and then countered with a question: why don’t you write a biography. He offered her full access to himself and to his papers, and encouraged his family and associates to cooperate, without, importantly, exerting any sort of …
Thanks to my friend Derek Alger, I was able to have lunch on Wednesday with Thomas Fleming, the very distinguished historian and novelist. Tom is the author of The Illusion of Victory, Duel, Washington’s Secret War, The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee, and the just published The Perils of Peace, about the struggles the …
Grim article about the state of book publishing by Leon Neyfakh in The New York Observer: “Think of it like a supply chain,” said one publishing executive who would not speak for attribution. “If the newspapers have fewer ads, they’re running fewer book reviews, so therefore, for those books that don’t have a pre-estab- lished …
A word of encouragement from Mr. Hugh Cook: “I want to thank you for posting your book reviews and author interviews on the Playboy Blog (blog.playboy.com). This longtime Playboy reader appreciates your efforts and commitment to the printed word.” Thanks, Hugh!
I had a very nice time Friday night at a fundraising dinner marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Hudson Valley Writers Center, a terrific organization that celebrates, teaches, and promotes writing. The event honored Ben Cheever (above, though murky)who is quite a good writer and a good friend of writers, and as …
Elizabeth Austin, a vice president of corporate communications at Playboy in Chicago, as well as a friend of Joanne Gruber, as well as an alumna of The Washington Monthly, as well as a friend of Nick Thompson, has, in the course of other correspondence, asked “Did I tell you how much I enjoyed The Coup? …
We got a visit at the office yesterday from the great James Ellroy, the author of L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid and other classic too numerous to mention. The classy Ellroy brought champagne for the staff, regaled us with memories of his favorite Playboy jokes and cartoons, talked about recording pornographic grunts for Velvet magazine in …