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Boston Globe
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A different kind of wedding singer, in a new novel by a writer and a songwriter
Around 15 years into their friendship, Levithan says, 'out of the blue, he wrote to me and said, 'I have this idea for a story. I think it might make a good book.'' What Levithan didn't know was that while Lekman was building his career as one of Scandinavia's most popular indie pop stars, he was also singing at weddings. The book he had in mind would focus on a musician who not only performs at weddings but also gets to know each couple to craft a unique and personalized song just for them. Every one of the book's chapters tells the story of one wedding, and includes the song — and along the way, the singer struggles in his own relationship. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Naturally, having written the songs for the ten weddings that take place in the book, Lekman decided to record them — partially because the audiobook would need them — but then, as Levithan points out, 'it would've made for a very strange album for the general public because they wouldn't have understood the stories that were going on without the context of the novel, so he decided to record another album,' this one telling the story of the novel through a new set of songs. Advertisement So what can a collaboration between a wedding singer and a novelist tell us about what makes for a good wedding? 'I think all weddings should have original songs composed by a singer,' Levithan says. 'Not every wedding couple can, of course, but I think the notion is to put yourself in the wedding, put yourself in the ceremony, ask yourself, 'what did lead us here, and where do we want to go from here?'' David Levithan will read at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, August 6, at And now for some recommendations…. Following his National Book Award-winning 'Hell of a Book,' Jason Mott's ' ' Advertisement Lauren Grodstein's ' Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Susan Choi Recommends a Book So Engrossing It Made Her (Almost) Lose Her Luggage
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Welcome to Shelf Life, books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you're on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you're here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too. What began as a short story in The New Yorker is now Susan Choi's sixth and latest novel, Flashlight, about a man who goes missing—and the resulting trauma for his family. Like the family in the book, Choi lived in Japan for a short period during her childhood. (Nor is this the first time she's shared autobiographical details with her characters: Her father was a math professor, like a character in 2003's A Person of Interest; she went to graduate school, the setting of 2013's My Education; and she attended a theater program in high school, as do the protagonists in 2019's National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise, for which she wrote at least 3 different endings.) Her second novel, 2004's American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and adapted into a film, and she has also written a children's book, Camp Tiger. Choi teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, yet one literary goal remains elusive: 'Trying to read 50 books a year,' she says. 'I've never achieved the goal and some years I don't even come close, but I love trying.' The Indiana-born, Texas-raised, New York-based bestselling author studied literature at Yale University; was once fired from a literary agency for being too much of a 'literary snob'; was a fact-checker at The New Yorker and co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker with editor David Remnick; won an ASME Award for Fiction for 'The Whale Mother' in Harper's Magazine; and has two sons. Likes: theater; fabric stores; kintsugi; the Fort Greene Park Greenmarket; savory buns; flowers. Dislikes: being on stage; low-hovering helicopters. Good at: rocking her gray hair. Bad at: cleaning menorahs; coming up with book titles. Scroll through the reads she recommends below. It's not exactly a missed-the-train moment, but I was re-reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov while waiting on a train platform [once], and when the train pulled in I stood up, still reading, boarded the train, still reading, and sat down, still reading…until at some point, after the train pulled away, I realized that I had left my luggage on the platform. Philip Roth's Everyman. I never would have thought a novel about the bodily decline and eventual death of a hyper-masculine Jewish guy who mistreats many of the women in his life—a lot like Philip Roth—could make me literally heave-sob at the end. But this is why Roth is such an incredible writer: He makes us feel enormous compassion for people we don't even like. Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, which kaleidoscopically compresses the stormy history of 20th-century Germany into barely a hundred pages, while holding the focus steady on a single plot of land. It's one of those books that makes you want to write. All of Proust. Or even just some decent amount of Proust. I love the prose but also find it so exquisite it's almost unbearable to continue reading for any length of time, at least for me, which makes me feel like a total failure as a reader. I might have to set aside a year of my life just to read Proust. Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall is impossible to put down, and it's also so tensely coiled from the very beginning that reading it I sometimes forgot to breathe! In some ways it's a 'small' story—about a girl and her parents doing a crazy-seeming reenactment of prehistoric life in the English countryside—but then it turns out to be about the biggest things, like what it means to be a people, or a nation, or even human. Rachel Khong's Real Americans, which I am so riveted by that as soon as I finish these questions, I'm picking it back up. It's a story about three people who, despite how deeply they feel for each other—and how deeply we feel for them—cannot manage to be a family. My heart is already half-broken and I'm only halfway through it. Paul Beatty's The Sellout. I was sitting on the beach in Maui (the one time I have ever been to Maui), reading that book instead of swimming, and a stranger came up to me to ask what it was because apparently I was laughing so hard I'd attracted general attention. In Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, two young guerilla fighters, boy and girl, fall madly in love and start having trysts in the back of an ambulance. The girl also has a pet squirrel that she's been carrying around in her bra, and, during the trysts, the squirrel runs frantically around the back of the ambulance. These are some of the funniest, wildest, most heartfelt sex scenes ever put on paper. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read it every few years because it feels new every time and, at the same time, it feels so familiar, like returning to a favorite place. I love every single sentence in it, even the sentences that are totally over-the-top (and there are a lot of them!) because they remind me that Fitzgerald was actually a fallible human being, capable of writing very over-the-top sentences sometimes. Sigrid Nunez's A Feather on the Breath of God shocked me the first time I read it because it really felt like the book was looking at me, like it knew exactly who I was. The protagonist has, like me, a real culture-clash background, and up to the point in my life when I read the book—the '90s—I'd never encountered that in fiction, so it was very emotional when I finally did. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Just read it. You'll thank me. Renee Gladman is one of my absolute favorite living writers/artists, yet I was totally unaware of her until maybe six years ago when I was recommended her work by an employee—I am so sorry I don't know his name—at my local indie bookstore. Now it feels unimaginable to me that I ever lived my life without Renee Gladman! Everything by Ali Smith, and Ali Smith herself. She is such a brilliant, compassionate, elating observer of us humans and the strange things we do. The London Library. A friend who's a member showed it to me a few years ago, and I never wanted to leave. Maybe they'll set up a hammock for me! PEN America, because they support freedom of expression, which none of us can take for granted anymore.$14.40 at at at at at at at at at at You Might Also Like The 15 Best Organic And Clean Shampoos For Any And All Hair Types 100 Gifts That Are $50 Or Under (And Look Way More Expensive Than They Actually Are)
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why is sex so scary to book banners?
The State Board of Education has required public schools to pull 21 books from library shelves since a regulation on "sexual conduct" took effect last summer. () This week, the State Board of Education voted to ban 10 more books from all South Carolina public schools, including my National Book Award-winning young adult novel 'Last Night at the Telegraph Club.' That means South Carolina has now banned 21 books statewide, making it the national leader in state-sanctioned book bans, a dubious distinction. 'Last Night at the Telegraph Club' is a historical coming-of-age novel about a 17-year-old Chinese American girl discovering her identity as a lesbian in 1950s San Francisco. In addition to the National Book Award, it won the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian Pacific American Literature Award, a Printz Honor, a Walter Dean Myers Honor, and dozens more accolades. And yet South Carolina's Board of Education has reduced it to a few paragraphs about sex. This is a fundamental misreading of the novel and a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of fiction. In its decision to ban my novel, the board is following Regulation 43-170, which prohibits any books in schools that include 'descriptions or visual depictions of 'sexual conduct,'' as defined by the state criminal code. This regulation deliberately sidesteps literary merit and the work as a whole in favor of focusing only on 'sexual conduct.' So, let's talk about sex. Why is it so bad — so 'inappropriate,' in the words of the regulation — for a book to include descriptions of 'sexual conduct'? The main character in 'Telegraph Club' is a teen named Lily who is coming to understand her sexual identity during the 1950s, a time in which sexuality was highly repressed. The scenes in the novel that focus on sexuality are about Lily testing her own freedoms — both emotional and physical. They are about Lily claiming the freedom to be who she is. Sexuality is a natural part of being human. As a writer, writing about sex and sexuality enables me to engage with questions about what makes us the people we become. It is an essential tool in a writer's creative toolbox, and it's one of the best ways we can get up and close and personal with a character and their emotions, desires, and fears. Reading about sex and sexuality is just about the safest way possible for a young adult to gain insight into what sex means. It is such a complex and important part of life. We cannot become who we are without the freedom to explore our choices in the privacy of our own minds. That is what reading gives us: the freedom to imagine different possibilities. I believe it's that freedom to imagine that is so frightening to those who seek to ban books. Banning books that include descriptions of 'sexual conduct' is an attempt to curtail individual freedom in our own bodies and minds. The 21 books that have been banned in South Carolina all approach sexuality from different perspectives. Some of them explore sexual freedom and pleasure; others explore more difficult issues such as sexual assault and misogyny. Some, like 'Telegraph Club,' are about identity and its connection with sexuality. None of them are right for every reader, but that doesn't mean they should be banned from all schools, from kindergarten through high school. There are plenty of legal arguments for why this regulation is unconstitutional. There are plenty of reasons South Carolina parents should be angry that one parent has been behind most of these book bans. Why does that one parent get to speak for all of you? But I'm not a South Carolinian, and I'm not a lawyer. I'm a writer. I believe these book bans are wrong because they attempt to limit our freedom to imagine different possibilities. We can't be fully human without that freedom.
Gulf Today
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
‘The Friend' is a gentle exploration of friendship indeed
The star of 'The Friend' has the loping stride of Robert Mitchum and the droopy, melancholy eyes of Peter Lorre. He has those classic Hollywood features — instantly accessible, forever unknowable - and when he walks down the street with his co-stars, Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, people's heads turn. 'People would go, 'Hey, get a load of the blonde,'' Murray says before acting out a double take. 'Get a load of THE DOG!'' Bing, the harlequin Great Dane of 'The Friend,' is the latest in a long line of four-legged big-screen breakout stars. But unlike canine idols before him, Bing is gigantic. Toto would fit in his paw and Asta could comfortably sit on his head. David Siegel, co-director of 'The Friend,' estimates Bing has a good 40 pounds (18 kilograms) on Watts. Gentle as he is, Bing looks more like one of those hulking walkers in 'Star Wars' than Lassie. 'The Friend,' which opens nationwide in theatres, isn't your average dog movie. either. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez's 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, it stars Watts as Iris, a New York author who reluctantly inherits Apollo (Bing), the cherished companion of her late mentor Walter (Murray). Their cramped coexistence is challenged not just by the pet policy of Iris' building but by Apollo's own grief, too. 'How creatures find each other — what we share with other humans but also animals — that's where the solace comes from,' says Siegel. 'We cast Bing to some degree for his countenance, just like we cast actors for their countenance. Does he have a face that can look sad? Does he look happy when he's happy?' On a recent spring day, Bing did indeed look happy, if a little worn out. He had spent the day at photo shoots and other media appearances, with his owner, Beverly Klingensmith, shuttling him around Manhattan in a van. Bing's duties, which included appearances on 'The Tonight Show' and 'The View,' were arguably more demanding of him than his biped co-stars. In between interviews, he warmly nuzzled a reporter while a grateful publicist compared him, given the pressures of a movie marketing, to an emotional support animal. 'At one of the Q&As, every time he'd move, the audience would go, 'Awww,'' said Klingensmith. 'Bill was like: 'I told them not to bring out the dog yet.'' But Murray and Watts have grown accustomed to being upstaged by their co-star. Not only that, as proud 'dog people,' they're delighted by Bing and praise him as not just a good boy but a fine actor. Murray has long maintained he wouldn't trust anyone that a dog didn't like. 'Dogs have a pretty good sense of who's OK,' Murray muses. 'I've met many thousands of people and there's a real high number of people I wouldn't trust. But as far as dogs, there's maybe only been, like, three.' For writer-directors Scott McGehee and Siegel, the filmmaking duo of 'The Deep End' and 'What Maisie Knew,' the prominence of the dog in Nunez's book — a black-and-white Great Dane graces the cover — was both a great hook for the movie and the biggest challenge in making it. When they contacted trainer Bill Berloni, he urged them to consider another breed. 'When you put that dog on the cover of a book that wins the National Book Award, it's got to be that dog,' says Siegel, laughing. 'Bill was like, 'Can't it be another dog?' We were like (holding up imaginary book): 'Look.'' An extensive search ultimately led them to an obedience-training club in Des Moines, Iowa. There, they found Bing and Klingensmith, who runs a kennel on a 10-acre property in Newton, Iowa, with her husband. The directors, having already looked coast-to-coast, stopped their search immediately. 'We kind of knew right away,' McGehee says. 'He was a little too young at the time. We thought we were going to be making the movie that spring. Then the pandemic hit. So he aged beautifully right into the role.' 'If you see George Clooney in person, it's like he attracts light in a special way,' adds McGehee. 'Bing has that.' Associated Press
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Naomi Watts digs deep into the vulnerability of a loner with ‘The Friend'
Better than any virtual character a crack visual effects team could conjure, the long-faced gentle giant of a dog that gives 'The Friend' its abiding soulfulness — a black-splotched Great Dane with the drooping eyes of a silent-era clown, credited as Bing — is also, it turns out, among the best co-stars a superlative onscreen sufferer like Naomi Watts could have in her long, storied career. Together, these beautifully mismatched but generous screen sharers help lift David Siegel and Scott McGehee's mild, casually elegant interpretation of Sigrid Nunez's National Book Award-winning 2018 novel about grief to a rarefied emotional place. Amid a handsomely shot New York of towering skylines, busy thoroughfares and cramped apartments, 'The Friend' strips the pet-movie genre from the easy appeal of mawkishness, bringing it closer to what an ongoing dialogue between lonely species stumbling into connection actually feels like. Watts, a veteran of onscreen interiority, plays Iris, a stagnated writer and professor unable to make sense of the recent suicide of her mentor and best friend Walter, played by Bill Murray in some dryly funny opening scenes that in effect give us a chance to miss him too. A genial misanthrope and serial womanizer who considers it a personal point of pride that after sleeping once with Iris they remained close, Walter nevertheless leaves behind many mourners: admirers, colleagues, a grown daughter (Sarah Pidgeon) from an affair, a couple of exes (Carla Gugino, Constance Wu) and a third and final wife (Noma Dumezweni), who informs Iris that it was Walter's wish that she take care of his pony-size companion, Apollo. The left-field bequest — as if tending to Walter's legacy with an overdue book of his correspondence wasn't enough — is, to Iris, a mystery on top of a conundrum. She suddenly finds her rent-controlled shoebox of an apartment taken over by a bed-hogging, furniture-destroying roommate whose very presence might get her evicted, if the unsmiling reminders from an otherwise friendly building super (Felix Solis) are any indication. But in her nerve-racked attempt to re-home Apollo while seeing to his needs, Iris is forced to reckon with what this 100-plus pounds of solemnity really is: an embodiment of Walter, sure, but also a creature just as grieving, blocked and lost as she is. Does one just push that away? Fans of Nunez's tartly discursive yet flowing novel will likely miss the snap of its critical observations on literary mind-sets and whatnot. Movies struggle to capture what's shaggy and bitter about writers without falling into the trap of one-liners. But while the author-world stuff falls into a kind of bland narrative dressing — even with the sturdy contributions of the supporting cast — Siegel and McGehee know the heart of their movie is in what Iris and Apollo create. They're an odd couple feeling each other out for a way back into life. Which is where the evergreen allure of Watts' mastery with sorrow comes in, her skills just as assured when in solo mode as when against others (including, yes, the gargantuan CGI ape of 'King Kong'). But with Bing, whom the filmmakers treat as a genuine co-star worthy of close-ups, contemplation and authentic dog behavior, Watts finds another rich vein of emotion to dramatize with delicacy, humor and intelligent vulnerability. Her Iris lets us see why, in our darkest times, the poles of forced solitude and togetherness can feel so unsatisfying, yet the right kind of aloneness can be the stuff of real healing.
