This Week's Hot Reads
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
This week: A journalist digs into the shocking story of the mob hit on his accountant father, Mary Karr's memoir about her alcoholism and Catholicism, a great fiction saga of Manhattan over four centuries, Paul Auster's newest and highly praised novel, and a deep look at the world of Google.
How E.L. Doctorow Does It
Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and a professor of journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author, most recently, of Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Important Ideals.
On the release of his new novel Homer & Langley, Eric Alterman talks to the great novelist about how he travels back in time and slips into the imaginations of his characters.
The Great New York Novel
Taylor Antrim is a critic for The Daily Beast and the author of the novel The Headmaster Ritual.
With echoes of Wolfe, Doctorow, and DeLillo, Colum McCann's mesmerizing Let the Great World Spin is a prophetic portrait of New York City in the summer of 1974.
The Girls of Paris, China
Sandra McElwaine is a Washington-based journalist. She has been a reporter for The Washington Star, The Baltimore Sun, a correspondent for CNN and People and Washington editor of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Currently she writes for The Washington Post, Time and Forbes.
Author Lisa See talks to Sandra McElwaine about her turbulent historical novel, Shanghai Girls, the Paris of Asia pre-WWII, arranged marriages, and the terror in 1940s Los Angeles.
The Best New Historical Fiction
C.W. Gortner’s novel The Last Queen (Ballantine Books) was a Marin Independent Journal bestseller and is currently being translated into eight languages. His next novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici will be published in 2010. He holds a MFA in Writing with an emphasis on Renaissance Studies and is a regular contributor to the Historical Novels Review. Visit him here or at his blog.
A female pope, a Japanese sleuth, stolen treasure, and a deal with the Devil-six sparkling new works of historical fiction that will replace your nixed trip to Bermuda with some time travel.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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