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Authoring Fame: A Reading List of Celebrity Narratives
On a February morning in 1910, silent film actress Florence Lawrence awoke to discover she was dead—according to the newspapers, anyhow. “I…was startled to see several likenesses of myself staring me...
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At the Autograph Show: Finding Peace in Saying No to My Mother, Tatum O’Neal
My mother used to draw these pictures when I was little and she was high. My sister and I would sit there with her and draw, too. My mother loved to be around my sister but my mother couldn’t not use...
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Thomas Jefferson Couldn’t Resist the Allure of Fame
Thomas Jefferson was a secretive individual, for the most part. As a product of his culture, he almost had to be. What self-revelation occurred was not done casually. It, too, was performative, and it...
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Oprah’s Book Club and… Dying? How Do Writers Get Famous
Why are some authors and books iconic? Why do other authors and books tank? It’s tempting to say that William Shakespeare is uniquely talented, and so is Stephen King. But, of course, there are plenty...
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First Lady of Space: How Sally Ride Became A Household Name Overnight
“Challenger, this is Houston,” astronaut Mary Cleave called up from the ground in Mission Control. “How do you read?” Mary was one of NASA’s newest astronauts, who’d been selected in a fresh batch of...
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All Publicity is Good Publicity: How Simple Familiarity Influences Our Decisions
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry quips, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Wilde was onto something. All...
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How to Gain a Gazillion Followers Online, Taco Bell Quarterly-Style
Recently—and, incidentally, in Lit Hub—I read a sentence that scared me more than anything I’ve ever read in a Stephen King story. In an interview, Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book...
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Five Red-Carpet Worthy Novels About the Perils and Pitfalls of (Fictional) Fame
The only thing better than stories about celebrities are stories about fake celebrities. Exploring the pitfalls and illusions of fame while simultaneously indulging in our obsession with it makes books...
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Mary Pipher on the Dizzying Pitfalls of Instant Fame
When Reviving Ophelia rocketed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, I was not prepared. I had expected that my main reward for writing this book would be learning to write with a New...
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Beyond Good and Evil: Reconsidering the Toxic Myth of the “Transgressive” Artist
Performing arts are seductive; passion is central to their content and mode of influence. Because passions are everywhere in theater, opera, and even symphonic music, it is easy for corrupt uses of...
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Eve Babitz on the Time She Played Chess Nude with Marcel Duchamp
In 1963 Walter Hopps forsook the Ferus Gallery, and even though it was only to become director of the Pasadena Art Museum, someone should have noticed how fast he was moving. He was only 28 and...
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Tragedies of Ambition: On the Fine Art of American Sportswriting
My hometown is an agricultural community named Clarksdale, Mississippi, at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49. If you know it at all, it’s as the home of the Delta blues, the droning, driving 12...
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Marlon James: One Day I Will Write About My Mother
My father’s doctors discovered too late in 2011 that they had missed his colon cancer spreading, despite operations and chemo. By the time they shifted blame for metastasis slipping right past them, he...
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Jean Rhys Had to Leave Her Home to Truly See It
On some mornings in the capital, thick with heat and a silence punctuated only by the insomnia whine of mosquitoes, Jean Rhys would wake up, briefly smiling, for she was convinced she had gone to bed...
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Scott McClanahan: “Most Fiction Feels Like a Bunch of Dumb Stories”
We spend much of our lives as literary and art-loving people searching for the next thing—the thing that will move and inspire us, or even, if you are like me, the thing that will totally hold our...
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Celebrities: They’re Not Just Like Us
Is it more embarrassing to be a celebrity or to be around one? On the one hand, a friend of mine once farted in an elevator with Kevin Spacey. On the other, Ed Sheeran exists, and so do his tattoos....
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Jill Eisenstadt and Darcey Steinke on Writing, Motherhood, and Brooklyn
I have known Jill Eisenstadt for nearly 30 years. We met in the early 1990s when we were both young novelists living in a Brooklyn that was not yet a literary mecca. Her first novel From Rockaway,...
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Encountering the Celebrity Male Gaze
I vividly remember hearing Khadijah Queen read at a packed bar in Seattle a few years ago. There was no microphone and Khadijah read very quietly; everyone in the room was straining to hear, hanging on...
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The Lives of the Poets Aren’t All That Cinematic
Far too often it is assumed that the creative arts are divorced from the demands of everyday existence; the image of the tortured genius in a study strewn with papers, or the artist toiling in front of...
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The Adolescent Charm of Bad Celebrity Poetry
Strange, sometimes, to think how utterly in thrall we are to a small and rarified group who have proven themselves to be, mostly, capricious and moody and immature; convinced that they have the answer...
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