Latest news with #BookClub
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Let's Talk About ‘The Catch,' by Yrsa Daley-Ward
In this month's installment of the Book Review Book Club, we're discussing 'The Catch,' the debut novel by the poet and memoirist Yrsa Daley-Ward. The book is a psychological thriller that follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were babies when their mother was presumed to have drowned in the Thames. The novel begins decades later, when Clara sees something strange: A woman who looks just like their mother is stealing a watch. Clara believes this is her mother, and wants to welcome her back into her life. Dempsey is less certain, in part because the woman doesn't seem to have aged a day. She believes the woman is a con artist because it's simply not possible for her to be their mother … right? What's real? What's not? And what does that mean for the lives of these struggling sisters? Daley-Ward unpacks it all in her deliciously slippery novel. On this episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin talks about 'The Catch' with his colleagues Jennifer Harlan and Sadie Stein. Other books mentioned in this week's episode: 'The Other Black Girl,' by Zakiya Dalila Harris 'The Haunting of Hill House,' by Shirley Jackson 'Wish Her Safe at Home,' by Stephen Benatar 'Erasure,' by Percival Everett (you can listen to our book club conversation about it here) 'Playworld,' by Adam Ross (you can listen to our book club conversation about it here) 'The House on the Strand,' by Daphne du Maurier 'Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,' by Max Porter 'The Furrows,' by Namwali Serpell 'Dead in Long Beach, California,' by Venita Blackburn 'The Vanishing Half,' by Brit Bennett 'Death Takes Me,' by Cristina Rivera Garza 'Audition,' by Katie Kitamura We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
UPI
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- UPI
'Ick' brought back Mena Suvari, Brandon Routh's early roles
1 of 7 | Mena Suvari, seen at the 2018 premiere of "Book Club" in Los Angeles, stars in "Ick." File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo LOS ANGELES, July 24 (UPI) -- Mena Suvari and Brandon Routh say their new movie Ick, in New York and Los Angeles theaters Thursday, brought them back to their earliest film roles. The pair play Staci and Hank, who were high school sweethearts in the early 2000s but have gone their separate ways. Suvari portrays both her adult and high school self, recalling her early roles as a high school choir girl in American Pie and high school cheerleader in American Beauty. In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Suvari, 46, said paying homage to her early roles was surreal. De-aging effects, like those used in Marvel movies and Gemini Man, made Suvari and Routh appear as they did in their past films for the high school scenes in Ick. "Wearing a cheerleading uniform again as a mom in my 40s was just all too surreal, something I never thought would happen," Suvari said. Ick director Joseph Kahn said he cast Suvari as Staci because of American Beauty. Hank pines for her even after Staci marries classmate Ted (Peter Wong). "Who is worthy of pining for for 20 years?" Kahn said. "Well, they made a movie about that girl in the 2000s. It was called American Beauty and she's on the poster." The American Beauty poster is intended to represent Suvari's character holding a rose. The midriff on the poster is a body double, however, and the hand belongs to a different model. Christina Hendricks shared on Instagram in 2019 that she posed as the hand model in 1999, something Suvari still wasn't aware of until this interview "What a small world," Suvari said. "That's the perfect example of this business in some way." Routh, 45, said young Hank is closer to his 2006 appearance in Superman Returns. Though the actor appeared on One Life to Live in 2001, Superman Returns was the earliest reference material for his looks in film grade quality. "I was sending them as many photos from college and stuff that I could find, but there wasn't any good quality stuff," Routh said. "The soap opera I was on was recorded on tape. So it was not good for making a [digital] model, I guess." Kahn said Superman Returns gave subtext to the character of Hank. Though Routh has continued to act, including in The CW's DC Arrowverse superhero shows, Kahn thinks the actor deserved more success. "Brandon when you meet him, he's a superhero," Kahn said. "He can make you laugh, can make you cry. He's really that charming. So we as an audience on a certain level have failed him I believe. Someone like this should have a much bigger career." At the film's Screamfest premiere in October, Routh discussed relating to Hank, who had a promising football career until an injury on the field took it all away. As an adult, Hank remains in his hometown of Seabrook as a high school science teacher. Routh previously said the film helped him make peace with unexpected career paths and realize he still had some maturing to do. Now, Routh says he approaches acting with more confidence and collaborative spirit. "I feel much more worthy of being here," Routh said. "I feel like I've earned my stripes to a degree. This is my chosen profession. Instead of just thinking about me, I guess, I'm often thinking about the whole product and everybody involved because that's the fun of it too." On Ick that collaboration extended to editor Chancler Haynes, who helped both actors with some of Kahn's more complicated techniques. The opening montage of Hank and Staci's high school relationship was shot at various points over the course of filming. Often, when at one location, they would film both modern-day scenes and flashbacks to over 20 years ago. Haynes would edit scenes so quickly he could show them what came before and after each scene they were about to film. "I don't think that that would've been as easy or possible if we didn't have such a great resource like someone like Chancler on set," Suvari said. "It was so fast paced." Kahn admitted even he wasn't sure it would work until it was all complete. "That opening sequence was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to do," Kahn said. "I didn't know what it looked like until the final shot. Then you press play and oh, it worked." Ick is not just a high school love story, however. The title refers to a mysterious substance that grows in Seabrook and has overrun the town after 20 years. The film never explains what Ick is or where it comes from, though many characters offer their own conspiracy theories. Kahn said this was intentional, because in real-life crises like 9/11 or COVID-19, people debate different theories even when an explanation is given. "We don't agree about anything," Kahn said. "So what the Ick actually is is never defined because we don't even define our monsters in real life." Kahn includes a clip of the 1958 film The Blob on a television, and wanted to bring back that sort of classic monster movie. Kahn laments that scary movies have gotten too intense for kids and families, like the graphic Final Destination franchise. "I wanted to make a monster movie, a true monster movie again. and also make one that didn't scar you," Kahn said. "Not too much sex, not too much drugs, not too much alcohol, still relevant and fun that you could safely watch with a 9-year-old to your grandmother. That's the idea." Hank and his student Grace (Malina Weissman), Staci's daughter, believe the Ick is dangerous. They struggle to convince others to do something about Ick before it is too late. Staci is one of the adults who chooses to ignore the Ick; she is more concerned with sending Grace to prom. "I just loved this character," Suvari said. "She was so checked out in so many ways." Hank believes Grace might be his daughter from the time he dated Staci, so he sends away for a DNA test. Whether it is confirmed or not, Routh believes that the Ick crisis has connected Hank and Grace in a positive relationship. "They've already bonded and created a friendship that definitely is different if they're not blood related, but also equally interesting," Routh said. "They have patterns that are similar in how they are dealing with the reality of what's happening, even if they're not related." Ick plays theaters everywhere beginning July 27.
Spectator
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Frances Wilson: Electric Spark – The Enigma of Muriel Spark
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the biographer Frances Wilson, whose new book Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark was recently lauded in these pages as 'mesmerising' and 'a revolutionary book'. She tells me how she immersed herself in the spooky life and peerless art of the great novelist, and why a conventional biographical treatment would never have been adequate to a subject for whom fiction and reality twined in unexpected and disconcerting ways. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to to find out more. For more Spectator podcasts, go to Contact us: podcast@
USA Today
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Why Oprah Winfrey 'would never' go to space like best friend Gayle King
Oprah Winfrey isn't joining her bestie Gayle King by going to space any time soon. The ex-"Oprah Winfrey Show" host got candid on the July 16 episode of the SiriusXM show "Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa" about why she skipped going on the infamous Blue Origin flight in April with her BFF. "I would never do it, but I became very interested in the whole process," Winfrey said. The Oprah's Book Club creator told Ripa that she was "just so proud to be there for" King, adding she was "relieved" that the "CBS Mornings" host went to space, "because if she'd asked one more time, 'What should I do? Do you think I should go?' I, from the beginning, was like, 'You should do it.'" Winfrey also revealed that she told King not to "let Katy Perry come down and say, 'It was really great fun.'" Kelly Ripa shuts down Mark Consuelos' 'repulsive' morning habit For the mission, King joined pop star Perry and billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' now-wife and author Lauren Sánchez Bezos along with three others for the first all-female flight to space in decades. However, the flight from Bezos-backed exploration company Blue Origin garnered widespread criticism. Still, Winfrey encouraged King to adventure. "You're going to be really saying, 'I should have done it,'" she recalled telling King. "The minute somebody says, 'Oh my God, like a life changing experience,' you're going to go, 'Oh, I should have done it.'" Oprah says July book club pick hooked her 'until the very last shocking sentence' The "Oprah Winfrey Show" star confessed that she knew it was time to leave her eponymous daytime talk show, which ended in 2011, when her team suggested they send an audience to space. "I remember going into a meeting and someone saying, 'I think what we should do is try to get people on a spaceship, or we should be able to take an audience or some audience members up on a spaceship,'" Winfrey said. Oprah Winfrey tells Kelly Ripa not to 'walk away' from 'Live' talk show After making the admission, Winfrey gave her fellow talk show host a word of advice and told her that "it's not time for you to step away" from "Live," which Ripa hosts with husband and actor Mark Consuelos, because "you have fun and it's easy and it's light enough. And serious enough when it needs to be, and it's not a grind." The "Oprah Podcast" host said that she loved hosting her own show, but it was different than Ripa's because the "Oprah" show dealt with heavier topics, sharing with the "All My Children" alum that "the nature of what we were doing every day became just so hard." Gayle King on 'disrespectful' space backlash, celebrity friends 'throwing shade' "Don't let go of the platform that you have. Do not do it. Don't even consider it," Winfrey said. "Because I feel that the reach that you have, the audience that you've built, the family that you've created – both inside the studio and in the rest of the world – is really more vital and important now than ever before."
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley review – teenage mothers and melodrama
Writers sometimes talk of giving birth to their books, but probably very few are also working as doulas. It's an experience that clearly informs Leila Mottley's new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, in which the struggles of pregnancy and motherhood loom large. Mottley's work as a doula comes in addition to writing a bestselling debut novel, Nightcrawling, and featuring on Oprah's Book Club; she was also youth poet laureate of Oakland, California, in 2018. But not much seems beyond the reach of the youngest ever writer to be longlisted for the Booker prize, back in 2022. The pity is that her considerable energy hasn't translated into a more satisfying second book. The Girls Who Grew Big tells the story of a gang of teenage mothers and the impromptu community they form in the humid disarray and general dysfunction of Padua, a fictional small town in the Florida panhandle. Led by their de facto leader, Simone, the Girls are a scrappy, ostracised handful of outsiders, variously rejected by their families and harshly judged by locals. Down on their luck and often abandoned by the adults in their lives, they resourcefully become a collective, based in the back of Simone's truck. At 20, Simone is the eldest, the mother of five-year-old twins Lion and Luck. When she finds herself unhappily pregnant again, she turns to the Girls for help. Among them is 17-year-old Emory, whose white family are appalled by her black boyfriend. She comes to the Girls when struggling to breastfeed her baby boy, Kai, and finds practical advice, sisterhood and support. Then new girl Adela washes up in town: a champion swimmer with college ambitions, exiled from her former life by an unplanned pregnancy and sent to stay with her grandmother for nine months. Emory is immediately infatuated, and soon the Girls find their community disrupted. Those are the bones of the book, and there's clearly something potent here: the raw lives of teenage mothers, the fierce bonds forged in adversity, the alarmingly unequal access to good-quality maternity care in contemporary America. And yet The Girls Who Grew Big ultimately lands awkwardly, emerging as a mawkish paean to motherhood. This is a well-meant novel about decent things – sisterhood and solidarity – but its sentiment is never more sophisticated than this, and the writing too often sinks into the syrupy. Nightcrawling, Mottley's novel about an impoverished teenage sex worker in Oakland who ends up at the centre of a police corruption case, was a startling debut: miraculously lucid, politically pointed and tenderly wrought. But in The Girls Who Grew Big, when Mottley reaches for gritty realism, she often gives us something that feels gratuitous instead. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The novel opens, for instance, with Simone chewing through not one but two umbilical cords as she gives birth to twins in the back of her boyfriend's truck. It's certainly striking, but it also reads like an unnecessary provocation. Simone reasons that her teeth are preferable to her boyfriend's dirty pocket knife, 'crusted in dried brown blood, shed fur from some long-dead animal, and Lord knows how many fishes' yellowed intestines', as Mottley seems intent on challenging the reader from the first. Later, calling in a favour, Simone reminds Emory that she 'sucked on her nipple just last week to get a clogged duct to flow again'. Birth is messy and women's bodies are unruly: Mottley insists we confront this. Her prose relishes the blood and milk, straight talk sometimes curdling into something more callow and needlessly graphic. Setting the novel in Florida allows Mottley dramatic licence and she makes the most of it. She has a hurricane hit Padua, and the Girls flee from it in their wildly veering vehicle. A storm fells a tree, which inconveniently closes the local Planned Parenthood clinic. An alligator turns up at Emory's high school like a bad omen. An orca beaches itself as if summoned by the novel's own need for symbolism and the Girls duly scramble to save it. Drama is Mottley's preferred mode, and the set pieces – a cat fight between Adela and Simone; a tense reveal between Adela and her new boyfriend – feel melodramatic rather than real. But the Mottley of Nightcrawling is here too, writing with poetic clarity in fleeting moments. She is excellent at capturing the mysterious quality of this neglected patch of Florida: its close, salty air, its turquoise waters and its white sands. She is believable on passion. When Emory gazes at Adela, she feels 'a crazed swirl at the bowl of [her] body', and she longs 'to know everything about her, even when she only gave me fractions'. But too often The Girls Who Grew Big feels overly ambitious, a virtuous rhapsody, determined to say something transcendent about young motherhood but stuck peddling folksy wisdom instead. The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
