January 30, 2021
There have been many outstanding books published recently about the acting life, life in the theater, life on a film set, and books by actors. They run the gamut from comic fiction to confessional memoir, redefining what it means to ‘act out.’ Each one offers much to savor.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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A Bright Ray of Darkness
By Ethan Hawke
Published by Knopf
Hawke’s multiple talents (see Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird in which he starred and produced, and which received the 2020 Center for Fiction On Screen Award) are in full evidence in his blistering new novel. His latest fiction is a black comedy that exploits every actor’s nightmare. We read along, cringing with eyes half shut, as a man of self-deprecating charm tries desperately to hang on to his career, as well as his marriage, while unraveling during a production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Think The Wolf of Wall Street for the theater with a lot to say about personal redemption and the responsibility of artistic endeavors.
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Walking with Ghosts
By Gabriel Byrne
Published by Grove Press
Celebrity memoirs are often composed of a series of show business anecdotes and personal history, but Gabriel Byrne’s new autobiography is so much more. Not someone who found his calling early, he unsuccessfully and sometimes painfully failed at entering the priesthood and becoming a plumber. What comes through so beautifully in this account of an accidental actor is his love of Dublin and family, and the intense soulfulness that makes him such a believable and compelling performer. Yes, there are wonderful stories of past Hollywood experiences and the ambivalence that comes with fame, but any fan of good storytelling (he is Irish, of course) will relish this book. A surprising treat for all.
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Truly Like Lightning
By David Duchovny
Published by FSG
One might forget Duchovny’s many achievements beyond his film career and multiple awards (for TV’s The X-Files and Californication), but three novels, three music albums, and some video games later—plus a degree from Princeton and studies at Yale—he is now publishing his fourth novel. Set in the idyllic California desert, Truly Like Lightning portrays a lapsed actor/newly converted Mormon and his wives and kids living off the grid. That is until a developer tempts them with selling some of their valuable land, and all the ugly aspects of the civilization they chose to escape confront them.
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Interior Chinatown
By Charles Yu
Published by Vintage
This 2020 National Book Award winner for Fiction features a Hollywood bit player stuck being typecast as the token Asian. Willis Wu is an extra with a dream of making it in the film business, but his escapades bring him deeper into his own immigrant roots and the novel takes on larger themes of race and assimilation. An audacious piece of fiction that works on many levels and highly deserving of its recent prize. If you missed this entertaining, dexterous novel in hardcover, it is just out in paperback.
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Trio
By William Boyd
Published by Knopf
A laugh riot tempered by a wry underbelly—that is classic comic Boyd. (Who can forget his 1981 debut, A Good Man in Africa? Pick it up if you haven’t read it.) Enter the insulated and indulgent world of a movie set as a closeted producer, an alcoholic director’s wife, a pill-popping ingénue (the title’s trio), fraud, blackmail, hubris, sexual innuendos, and flagrant affairs all combine in a froth of hilarious satire. It is a dizzying ride that only a gifted writer like Boyd could pull off, while also making you care deeply about each one of his flawed characters.
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This Is Not My Memoir
By André Gregory & Todd London
Published by FSG
André Gregory, now in his 80s, is another storyteller extraordinaire. His film with Wallace Shawn, My Dinner with André, is a classic of documentary filmmaking that proved that conversation between two people is anything but static. Always poised between his aristocratic French roots and a life in experimental theatre, these two pieces of the puzzle formed a man of voracious curiosity, and devotion to craft. In this lovely reminiscence (his avant-garde beginnings, his love of process, Indian monasteries and more), we get a portrait of the artist behind the finished products we loved on the stage and screen—an extraordinary life, not yet in its final act.
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