Marilyn Monroe

 

Fame is not what it used to be: Why stars like Marilyn and Elvis don’t exist anymore

In a world consumed by social media influencers and superheroes, the film industry is wallowing in nostalgia for the great icons of yesteryear

Begoña Gómez Urzaiz
Barcelona, November 3, 2022

It happens more often now, even to people well versed in pop culture: one day, you discover that you don’t know half of the actors and actresses featured in the Hollywood issue that Vanity Fair puts out to coincide with the Oscars. Who is that actress next to Nicole Kidman? No idea. Who is at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100? No clue (Morgan Wallen, Steve Lacy). Emma Chamberlain’s house goes viral, and we are not quite clear about who she is, let alone what the 21-year-old has done to earn enough money to buy a $4.3 million mansion (answer: she is a social media phenomenon who has signed deals with Levi’s, Cartier and Louis Vuitton). This lack of pop culture knowledge isn’t just a matter of getting old; it shows that intergenerational and “inter-bubble” conversation has become increasingly difficult.

Jeanne Moreau / A Grande Dame of the French New Wave

Moreau was a new kind of heroine, whose glamour had no gloss, whose elegance had no airs, who seemed to burst fussy constraints with every word she spoke, every glance she shot, every step she took.

Postscript: Jeanne Moreau, a Grande Dame of the French New Wave

By Richard Brody
July 31, 2017

The idea of Jeanne Moreau is as great as the onscreen presence of Jeanne Moreau because, in her performances, she embodied ideas in motion, and, for that matter, one big idea: Moreau, who died on Monday at the age of eighty-nine, was a grande dame without haughtiness or prejudice. Her grandeur didn’t erect walls around her; it widened her vistas, increased her curiosity, enabled her adventures, overcame narrow boundaries. She was a queen of intellect—but an intellect that was no cloistered bookishness but an idea and an ideal of culture that enriched experience, envisioned progress, looked ardently at the times.

Someone once wrote that Cary Grant looks like a person who’s thinking; I’d say he’s rather lost in thought, whereas Moreau seems at home in thought, standing on a solid foundation of knowledge that makes her searching focussed, precise, intention-sharp. If Alfred Hitchcock had known how to film heroic women, Moreau would have been the most Hitchcockian of active and intrepid women—and François Truffaut, who was among the most faithful and profound of Hitchcockians, recognized that trait when he cast her in “The Bride Wore Black,” one of his most conspicuously Hitchcockian films.

 

Shannen Doherty photographed at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, CA, on November 20, 2023.
Photo by John Russo 

Shannen Doherty Wants to 'Embrace Life' as Cancer Has Spread to Her Bones: 'My Greatest Memory Is Yet to Come' 

The 'Beverly Hills, 90210' star opens up in PEOPLE's latest cover story about her Stage 4 cancer diagnosis and how she hopes to inspire others by focusing on her future

By Danielle Bacher
Updated on November 29, 2023 09:29AM EST

Shannen Doherty doesn’t mince words.

“I don’t want to die,” she asserts as a sliver of Los Angeles sunshine falls across her face on the set of her PEOPLE cover shoot four days before Thanksgiving.

 

Illustration: Tim Bouckley

‘It took me a decade’: the 2023 Booker prize shortlisted authors on the stories behind their novels

Paul Murray, Chetna Maroo, Paul Lynch, Jonathan Escoffery, Sarah Bernstein, Paul Harding

Saturday 18 November 2023

Paul Murray

The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton)

 Photograph: Patrick Bolger/

I started writing The Bee Sting at the end of 2017. I’d spent the previous 18 months working on a screenplay and I was aching to get back to the freedom and possibility of a novel. But for a long time I couldn’t decide what to write. I had three very different ideas and I started making notes for each one: blocking out scenes, tracing character arcs, all that. Looking back, I can see I was nervous about beginning something new after being away from fiction for so long, and trying to prove to myself that it would work. But notes don’t tell you anything about a novel’s voice, which is the most important thing about it, and which you won’t discover until you actually start to write.

 

‘No one voice dominates’ … from top left: Sarah Bernstein, Paul Lynch and Chetna Maroo. Bottom row from left: Paul Murray, Jonathan Escoffery and Paul Harding.

Analysis

‘Portraits of what it means to be alive today’: how we chose the 2023 Booker prize shortlist

Esi Edugyan

Thursday 21 September 2023

Any conversation about what reflects the best of world literature necessarily becomes a referendum on what literature can and should do. As chair of judges for this year’s Booker prize, I think it’s safe to say the conversations between my fellow judges and I were never dull. Adjoa Andoh, Mary-Jean Chan, James Shapiro and Robert Webb and I spoke for hours to decide on our shortlist, always going overtime. What, we asked ourselves, made a book great? Was it extraordinary prose? An uncanny vision? Was it even something definable or some more ineffable quality?

 

The Booker judge Esi Edugyan described the shortlist discussions as ‘often enthralling, sometimes intimate, sometimes charged’.

Just one British writer makes the Booker prize shortlist

This article is more than 1 month old

Chetna Maroo’s ‘mesmerising’ Western Lane has been chosen on a male-dominated list

 ‘Portraits of what it means to be alive today’: how we chose the 2023 Booker prize shortlist

Ella Creamer

Thursday 21 September 2023

Just one novel by a British writer has made the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. The list is also weighted towards male writers for the first time in eight years.

Four of the six shortlist places went to novels by men: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Study for Obedience by the Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein completes the list. None of the six authors have been shortlisted for the prize before.

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Previously nominated authors Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray join 13-strong field including four debuts

Ella Creamer

Tuesday 1 August 2023

A longlist of 13 “original and thrilling” books offering “startling portraits of the current” are in contention for the 2023 Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award.

The longlist features four debut novelists and six others who have been longlisted for the first time, alongside Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray, who have seven previous Booker nominations between them.

The Booker prize 2023 longlist

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Canongate)

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Granta Books)

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (4th Estate)

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Pearl by Siân Hughes (The Indigo Press)

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Tinder Press)

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld)

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Picador)

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)

The new novel from Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

The new novel from Paul Lynch: 

PROPHET SONG

• SHORTLISTED FOR 

THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023

• SHORTLISTED FOR AN POST IRISH 

NOVEL OF THE YEAR

An NPR Book of the Year

An FT audiobook of the year

A fearless portrait of a society on the brink and a mother’s battle to save her family

Oneworld: UK, Ireland, Commonwealth: 24 August 2023

Grove Atlantic: North America, 12 December 2023

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

​

"If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song...a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere." 

— Observer

Booker Prize winner ‘Prophet Song’ is a prophetic masterpiece

Booker Prize winner ‘Prophet Song’ 

is a prophetic masterpiece

Paul Lynch’s novel is a terrifying story about the ascent of modern-day fascism

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Review by Ron Charles
November 27, 2023

If Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song” were a horror novel, it wouldn’t feel nearly as terrifying. But his story about the modern-day ascent of fascism is so contaminated with plausibility that it’s impossible not to feel poisoned by swelling panic. I woke up three mornings in a row from nightmares Lynch had sown in the soil of my jittery brain.

Illutration by Lucy Naland

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch review – Ireland under fascism

This Booker-longlisted dystopia with shades of Cormac McCarthy is nightmarish yet horribly convincing

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Melissa Harrinson
Tuesday 31 August 2023

T

he Irish offspring of The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. From its opening pages it exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world leaking out from its pages like black ink into clear water.

Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song. Photograph: Gary Doak

Paul Lynch’s timely Booker winner is a novel written to jolt the reader awake

Justine Jordan

Prophet Song imagines an Ireland under fascist control, breaking through the it-couldn’t-happen-here complacency of western societies

 

‘Soul-shattering’ Prophet Song by Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker prize

Justin Jordan

Sun 26 Nov 2023 21.53 GMT

W

ith Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the judges have chosen perhaps the most timely and urgent book on the shortlist – a novel explicitly plugged into global strife and political tectonic forces. But it’s also the very intimate, elemental story of one woman’s love for her family, and her desperate attempts to hold on to the immediate world around her in the face of rising chaos.

 

Paul Lynch said it was ‘with immense pleasure’ that he brought ‘the Booker home to Ireland’. Photograph: David Levenson

‘Soul-shattering’ Prophet Song by Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker prize

The Irish author’s novel set in an imagined Dublin descending into far-right tyranny wins £50,000 prize

 Paul Lynch’s timely Booker winner is a novel written to jolt the reader awake

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Ella Creamer
Sunday 26 November 2023

Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker prize for his fifth novel Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny. It was described as a “soul-shattering and true” novel that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment” by the judging chair, Esi Edugyan.