Latest news with #Simon&Schuster
Gulf Today
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Producer Jeffrey Seller shines a light on his own journey
Jeffrey Seller, the Broadway producer behind such landmark hits as 'Rent,' 'Avenue Q' and 'Hamilton,' didn't initially write a memoir for us. He wrote it for himself. 'I really felt a personal existential need to write my story. I had to make sense of where I came from myself,' he says in his memento-filled Times Square office. 'I started doing it as an exercise for me and I ultimately did it for theatre kids of all ages everywhere.' Seller's 'Theater Kid' — which he wrote even before finding a publishing house — traces the rise of an unlikely theater force who was raised in a poor neighbourhood far from Broadway, along the way giving readers a portrait of the Great White Way in the gritty 1970s and 80s. In it, he is brutally honest. 'I am a jealous person. I am an envious person,' he says. 'I'm a kind person, I'm an honest person. Sometimes I am a mean person and a stubborn person and a joyous person. And as the book shows, I was particularly in that era, often a very lonely person.' Seller, 60. who is candid about trysts, professional snubs, mistakes and his unorthodox family, says he wasn't interested in writing a recipe book on how to make a producer. 'I was more interested in exploring, first and foremost, how a poor, gay, adopted Jewish kid from Cardboard Village in Oak Park, Michigan, gets to Broadway and produces 'Rent' at age 31.' 'Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir' by Jeffrey Seller. AP It is the story of an outsider who is captivated by theatre as a child who acts in Purim plays, directed a musical by Andrew Lippa, becomes a booking agent in New York and then a producer. Then he tracks down his biological family. 'My life has been a process of finally creating groups that I feel part of and accepting where I do fit in,' he says. 'I also wrote this book for anyone who's ever felt out.' Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, says he isn't surprised that Seller delivered such a strong memoir because he believes the producer has an instinctive artistic sensibility. 'There aren't that many producers you could say have literally changed the face of theater. And I think that's what Jeffrey Seller has done,' says Karp. 'It is the work of somebody who is much more than a producer, who is writer in his own right and who has a really interesting and emotional and dramatic story to tell.' The book reaches a crescendo with a behind-the-scenes look at his friendship and collaboration with playwright and composer Jonathan Larson and the making of his 'Rent.' Seller writes about a torturous creative process in which Larson would take one step forward with the script over years only to take two backward. He also writes movingly about carrying on after Larson, who died from an aortic dissection the day before 'Rent's' first off-Broadway preview. ''Rent' changed my life forever, but, more important, 'Rent' changed musical theater forever. There is no 'In the Heights' without 'Rent,'' Seller says. 'I don't think there's a 'Next to Normal' without 'Rent.' I don't think there's a 'Dear Evan Hansen' without 'Rent.'' So enamored was Seller with 'Rent' that he initially ended his memoir there in the mid-'90s. It took some coaxing from Karp to get him to include stories about 'Avenue Q,' 'In the Heights' and 'Hamilton.' ''Hamilton' becomes a cultural phenomenon. It's the biggest hit of my career,' Seller says. 'It's one of the biggest hits in Broadway history. It's much bigger hit than 'Rent' was. But that doesn't change what 'Rent' did.' In a sort of theater flex, the memoir's audiobook has appearances by Annaleigh Ashford, Danny Burstein, Darren Criss, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Andrew Rannells, Conrad Ricamora and Christopher Sieber. There's original music composed by Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tom Kitt. The portrait of Broadway Seller offers when he first arrives is one far different from today, where the theaters are bursting with new plays and musicals and the season's box office easily blows past the $1 billion mark. Associated Press
Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended May 25
3. Doubleday 4. Knopf 5. Berkley 6. Little, Brown and Company 7. Simon & Schuster 8 Mariner Books 9. Riverhead Books 10. Orbit HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Penguin Press Advertisement 2. W. W. Norton & Company Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 3. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C 4. Crown 5. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster 6. Random House 7. Penguin Press 8. John Green Crash Course Books Advertisement 9. Scribner 10. The Dial Press PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Ecco 2. Berkley 3. Vintage 4. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster 5. Riverhead Books 6. Vintage 7. Poisoned Pen Press 8. Random House Trade Paperbacks 9. Penguin Books 10. Harper Perennial PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Crown 2. Michael Finkel Vintage 3. Vintage 4. Harper Perennial 5. Milkweed Editions 6. Haymarket Books 7. Holt Paperbacks Advertisement 8. Matt Kracht Chronicle Book 9. TarcherPerigee 10. Knopf The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, May 25, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, June 1
1. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 2. Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $30) The bestselling crime writer returns with a new cop on a mission, this time on Catalina Island. 3. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 4. Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf: $30) Two Floridians are plunged into a mystery involving dark money and darker motives. 5. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 6. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley: $29) Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of an heiress. 7. Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books: $32) The bestselling writer's latest comic novel takes on capitalism and consumption. 8. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 9. The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (Orbit: $30) A young prophet takes an impossible quest with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight. 10. Anima Rising by Christopher Moore (William Morrow: $30) The tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter and an undead woman's journey of self-discovery. … 1. Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press: $32) Inside President Biden's doomed decision to run for reelection and the hiding of his serious decline by his inner circle. 2. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 3. Who Knew by Barry Diller (Simon & Schuster: $30) A frank memoir from one of America's top businessmen. 4. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Co.: $32) The naturalist explores rivers as living beings whose fate is tied with our own. 5. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 6. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press: $45) The Pulitzer-winning biographer explores the life of the celebrated American writer. 7. Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf: $32) Diary entries from the famed writer's journal. 8. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A call to renew a politics of plenty and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. 9. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf: $28) Reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. 10. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron Books: $33) An insider's account of working at Facebook. … 1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 3. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 4. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 5. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $19) 6. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 7. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17) 8. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper Perennial: $19) 9. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 10. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (Grove Press: $22) … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 3. The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin: $19) 4. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 5. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18) 6. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 7. Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (Tarcher: $20) 8. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $36) 9. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13) 10. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)
USA Today
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Dave Barry is the eternal class clown
Dave Barry is the eternal class clown | The Excerpt On a special episode (first released on May 25, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Nationally-syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry memoir chronicles his life mostly spent joking around. Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Dana Taylor: Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, May 25th, 2025, and this is special episode of The Excerpt. Think back, do you remember the person voted class clown at your high school? Is that person still doing funny antics in adulthood? One person who can nab that claim to fame is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dave Barry. Barry has made a career out of being a jokester, writing a nationally syndicated humor column for two decades. He's also a best-selling author. His latest book is Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. Class Clown is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining me on The Excerpt, Dave. Dave Barry: Thanks for having me, Dana. Dana Taylor: You've written a lot of books. Why this memoir and why now? Dave Barry: Well, I was a little nervous about writing a memoir. Why now is like, I'm 77 years old. If I don't write it now, I don't know when I'm going to write it. And my editor at Simon & Schuster, Priscilla Paton, and I agreed that maybe this would be a good time to write a memoir. I hope she was right. I was a little nervous about talking about myself, which I don't usually. Well, I do talk about myself, but I'm usually kidding. In this case, I'm sometimes telling the truth. Dana Taylor: How have your experiences in childhood shaped your career as a humorist? Dave Barry: My parents were really funny people. It's weird because both of them had sort of tragic elements to their lives. My dad dealt... fought with alcoholism much of his life. He recovered. My mom committed suicide after my dad died, which was brutal for everybody. But this is going to be weird to say, my mom was the funniest person I've ever known. She had a very dark sense of humor, but it was a real, edgy, strong sense of humor. And despite what I just said, I had a remarkably happy childhood, and both my parents encouraged humor in our family, and so that's kind of where I got started trying to make my family laugh. Dana Taylor: I was going to say you didn't shy away from serious matters including intense and vulnerable moments with, as you've said, both your mom and dad. Can you tell us more about one of them and how did these moments change you? Dave Barry: Well, I'll take my mom. She dealt with depression all her life, and ultimately it's what she lost to. She had a tough childhood. She grew up in the depression, and she literally lived in a sod house in Nebraska when she was a kid. But she had this ability to always see humor in things and never... it was the one rule in our lives and our family. You don't take anything, especially yourself too seriously. That was our environment as we were kids. Although she had her demons, she didn't let them affect us. What we saw from her was a very funny person who loved us very much, took good care of us. She couldn't beat them in the end, but she passed along that that sense of humor, that edginess, that willingness to not take yourself seriously. That's really what made me. Dana Taylor: Dave, I know you were a news reporter before you pivoted to writing humor columns at the Miami Herald. What lessons from your early journalism career have stayed with you? Dave Barry: Well, I love journalism. I love to be in a newspaper reporter. I learned everything I knew about journalism at this little newspaper in Pennsylvania, but I also learned the quirks and foibles of the newspaper world, the way newspapers tend to present themselves as authorities on everything. And the fact is, it was really people like me writing the newspapers. So when I switched over to the humor side, I could make fun of newspapers and the news business, but from a position of A, love and B, deep knowledge, I've been there. I've written those stories, and I think that really helped me kind of connect with the newspaper reading audience like they were used to reading newspapers that took themselves pretty seriously, and I was a person who came along and said, "You don't have to take us that seriously. Some of us are clowns. I'm one of them." Dana Taylor: You spend a good deal of your book talking about reader feedback, some nice, some not so nice. Why were these important to you? I know you wrote about how you even enjoyed the hate mail. Dave Barry: Yeah, my reader... I loved my readers. My readers did not all love me. One of the things you learn if you write in any kind of column, but especially a humor column, is no matter what you write, somebody's going to be really angry at you and want you fired. And so there was a certain percentage of my readers, I called them the humor impaired, who never figured out that I was kidding. Like if I would say, [inaudible 00:04:43] we all know Abraham Lincoln invented the light bulb and then go on and they would write letters to the editor, "Abraham Lincoln did not invent the..." and then usually they would get it wrong. They say, Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb. But anyway, I love those people. They enabled me to write whole columns about the reaction I got to my columns. Then of course, the vast majority of my readers did get the joke, and that's why I was able to stay in the news. That's why they didn't fire me when they were told to by the humor impaired readers. So my readers made my column work. I got so much from them. I got so many ideas from them, and they would send me clippings about weird things happening. I wrote a million columns based on that stuff. So I put a lot of my readers into this book. I mean, they're a big reason why I made it, I was successful as a columnist. Dana Taylor: What's your take on humorous power to change the national conversation, which has become so partisan with last November's election? Dave Barry: I don't think that humorists have that much power to change anything, to be honest, if I'm being brutally honest. I mean, I think some of us would like to think we do, but we don't really. I kind of don't like where we've gone with humor, political humor in this country. I talk about this in the book, how I kind of grew up in the era of Johnny Carson and Art Buchwald, people like that who were very funny, but you didn't really know their politics or it didn't matter what their politics were because they laughed at whoever was in charge, whoever was running the country, and everybody got that that if you laughed at the leader, didn't mean you hated your country, would mean you were an evil person or whatever. And a lot of the humor, I think now, a lot of political humor is basically tactical. It's like it's aimed at one side or the other side so the people who agree with you can laugh at it, but the people who don't agree with you hate you for it. There's just a lot of anger in the humor now, and I think that's unfortunate. I was happier with the way it worked when people kind of agreed, "Well, we're all on the same side. We may disagree politically, but we are on the same side." We sort of lost that I think. Dana Taylor: I'm sure some of our listeners and viewers are very inspired by your unique career path. What's your advice for writers who'd like to become humorous? Dave Barry: Oh man. Well have a day job for sure. It's tough. I used to hear all the time from people who wanted to be newspaper columnists. There's not that many anymore because there's just not that many newspapers anymore. So people who want to do humor have to sort of go more toward the internet, some stack and places like that, or stand-up comedy or writing for television, whatever. And my advice is always the same thing. If you're funny, eventually people will discover you. They will recognize that you're funny, but it's going to take a while usually for that to happen, and while you're waiting for it to happen, you kind of have to be able to support yourself somehow. So that's the most important thing. Don't give up, but don't be too optimistic that it's just going to suddenly happen for you. Dana Taylor: When people sit down to write their memoirs, it often makes a person introspective about their lives. Looking back, is there anything you'd do differently, a moment that gives you pause or an inflection point for you? Dave Barry: More inflection point than regret. I've really been very, very lucky. I mean, I did not ever think until I was in my mid-30s it didn't occur to me I would be able to make a living writing humor. I was doing other things. I was working as a newspaper reporter. I was teaching effective writing seminars to business people, but I was writing humor whenever I could, but I didn't think that would ever become a real job. I got several big lucky breaks along the way. I wrote a couple of stories that just caught the attention of a bunch of editors to the topics I happened to be on and got launched that way. I still feel just like that. I've been very, very lucky more than anything else. I had this incredible career where I never had to do anything from my mid-30s on. I never had to work. I just had fun basically. Dana Taylor: What's next for you Dave? Dave Barry: After this memoir? I guess continued immaturity, followed by death. Not in any hurry, but I mean, that's what I see coming. Dana Taylor: That's the most unique ending I've had to an interview. Dave, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt. Dave Barry: It's my pleasure, Dana. Thanks for having me. Dana Taylor: Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
The Hindu
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Vir Das takes a dig at ‘film people' for expressing displeasure over influencers walking the Cannes red carpet
Comedian Vir Das took to social media to call out film personalities who expressed displeasure over influencers walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. In a note he posted on X and Instagram, he shared that he understood the appeal and eyeballs walking on a red carpet can bring to largely 'unknown designers' and went on to appreciate them for their hustle. He added, 'It's not for me, but I can respect the underdog energy.' Look. I work largely with new unknown designers. So I get the appeal and eyeballs that a red carpet brings. I also respect the hustle that it takes to get your ass there. It's not for me, but I can respect the underdog energy. So all that being said….Can I just say…..'Film'… — Vir Das (@thevirdas) May 22, 2025 The comedian also took a jab at 'film people' by asking them to stop going on podcasts hosted by influencers and avoid collaborating with them to promote their projects if their presence at the festival evoked such negative reactions in them. 'Consider the possibility that they may not be as well dressed as you, or as good looking as you, but are more interesting. Cannot believe I'm defending influencers but the elitism is off the hook,' he said. In the last few years influencers like Kusha Kapila, Nancy Tyagi, Ranveer Allahbadia, Ankush Bahuguna, and Dolly Singh walked the red carpet and this year saw people like Anushka Sen, Sarah Sarosh, and Nitibha Kaul make an appearance at the festival. Just last month, the Comedian announced the title of his memoir, The Outsider, which is set to be published by Simon & Schuster. The memoir recounts several key incidents from Das's life, including a moment when he was stranded on a pier in Cozumel, Mexico, after his cruise ship left without him due to visa issues.
