The Buzz Board
Picks from the Inner Circle
Author of My Paper Chase |
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Pulitzer! Everyone knows the prize, fewer the man. Here's an antidote to the hand-wringing about the future of the newspaper, a full-scale, full-blooded biography of a penniless immigrant from Hungary who showed what newspapers could do. The eponymous biography by James McGrath Morris is seriously good history but much of it—skullduggery and sin writ large—makes today's tabs seem tame. |
Author of My Paper Chase |
![]() My Case Rests is an entertaining short novel by the prolific B.H. Friedman, the first biographer of his friend the tormented artist Jackson Pollock and of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. He’s also the author of Tripping, a memoir of life inside Timothy Leary’s circle, where so many dreams turned into nightmares. The man in search of his identity in My Case Rests is Antonio Cristoforo Baldini, aka Broadway’s Tony Baldwin, who pays with his soul, it seems, for an early act of sacrilege committed when he was growing up in a crime family in Little Italy. The novel is published by Provincetown Arts Press—a nonprofit small press with a vibrant magazine, soon to celebrate its 25th birthday. Don’t miss editor Christopher Busa on Norman Mailer and the night he hailed a taxi that turned out to be a cop car. |
Author of My Paper Chase |
![]() Michael Thomas, a onetime curator at the Met, a onetime partner at Lehman Brothers, and known to most as a droll and vivid columnist in the New York Observer, has drawn on his intimate knowledge of the worlds of art, finance, law, clubland, society, deal-making—and I dare say love-making—to write a page-turner of a novel. His heroine is a beautiful and monied television icon of good living married to a filmmaker she’s emasculated. Will the worm turn? The twists and turns of a cunningly crafted plot, loaded with acute social observations, make Love and Money a beguiling beach read and there’s an intellectual entertainment, too, in an ingenious coda played out before delicious caricatures of nine Supreme Court justices. |






