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 haunting novel about a house that sees the tides of history, a new memoir-novel from Jeannette Walls, a powerful eyewitness account of the surge in Iraq, a new thriller from David Baldacci, and a manifesto for dealing with email.
The Men in the Mirror
Richard Abowitz is on the staff of Las Vegas Weekly and writes the Movable Buffet blog and column for Los Angeles Times. He covers and music and culture, and for a decade has chronicled the rise and continuing fall of Las Vegas.
Before Michael Jackson's death, his impersonators' lives were, at best, uneventful. Now they're in high demand-and have strangers weeping in front of them.
Back to the '90s
Isabel Wilkinson is an assistant editor at The Daily Beast.
Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Terry McMillan-the 1990s were a beach-read paradise of movie-optioned paperbacks. Here are nine page-turners just as addictive as they were a decade ago.
Hot-Blooded Horror
Nick Antosca is the author of the novels Midnight Picnic (Word Riot Press, 2009) and Fires (Impetus Press, 2006). His writing has appeared in Nerve, Hustler, The New York Sun, Identity Theory, The Barcelona Review, The Huffington Post, and others. He was born in New Orleans and lives in New York, and his blog is Brothercyst.
Park Chan-wook's new vampire-meets-priest thriller, Thirst, wowed audiences at Cannes and has just hit the States. Nick Antosca talks to the director about how sexy gore can be.
The Ultimate Michael Merchandise
Renata Espinosa is the New York editor of Fashion Wire Daily. She is also the co-founder of impressionistic fashion and art blog TheNuNu and a sometimes backup dancer for "The Anna Copa Cabanna Show."
After the King of Pop's death, Michael Jackson T-shirt sales are booming. But which tee, Renata Espinosa asks, best pays tribute to the fallen idol? View our gallery to find out.
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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