Today in the Gawker Book Club: starting now or so, Douglas Rogers is joining us to discuss The Last Resort, his new memoir about Zimbabwe. Asking him questions in comments is novelist, playright and screenwriter Damian Lanigan.
It's time for another Gawker Book Club meeting: Ann Louise Bardach will be discussing her new book Without Fidel: A Death Foretold. Our topic today at 4pm: how Perez Hilton caused havoc in Miami by falsely reporting Fidel's death.
In the latest edition of the Gawker Book Club, we have Stephen Elliott discussing his murder potboiler-cum-memoir The Adderall Diaries with special guest interviewer Gawker special correspondent James Frey. They'll be dropping in comments around 12:30pm. Why not join in?
For the Gawker Book Club's second installment, we get literal: our own John Cook and Merge Records co-founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance are discussing Our Noise, a history of one of the labels that defined 90s indie rock.
Gawker friend R. Nicholas Kuszyk, the Williamsburg-based robot artist who occasionally fools the world into thinking he is Banksy, has a new book about, yes, Robots, so why don't you pick it up? Art sample photo below!
This is the first meeting of the new Gawker Book Club. The author will be popping into the comments to answer questions. Up first: Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg.
New book Six Degrees of Paris Hilton profiles Darnell Riley, a shady criminal and pseudo-celebrity hanger-on who knows many wicked Hollywood-sleaze secrets. The tome spins many damning stories about the hood-lidded socialite's sordid existence.
"I may not have always been a New Yorker," Hillary Clinton, who lives in Washington, said in her farewell-to-the-Senate address, "but I know I always will be one." She wrote a book about it!
The White House has released an awesome book called "Highlights of Accomplishment and Results" from "The Administration of President George W. Bush." Let's page through it!
So we're wading through the boring parts of the book proposal that Crown decided at the last minute that it was too classy to publish, finding out lots about ex-nanny Melissa Dumas and not a whole lot about her employer "M." It was interesting, though, to read about the goings-on in London's Kabbalah Centre. Melissa's first meeting with her new employer took place there, and while it was short, it wasn't exactly sweet.
You know, at first we thought we would post all 75 pages of Melissa Dumas's proposal for This Used to Be My Playground, including the section entitled "Marketing: Nannies in the Zeitgeist" ("The interest in the world of Nannies has been a mainstay in film and television and literature as far back as 1937 when the original book, Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers was published. Since then, there have been an additional six books published as part of the Mary Poppins series, all of which remain in print today.") But then we realized that, despite the legal fears that we assume motivated Crown to decide to un-buy the book, there really is not that much good stuff in there. Like: Madonna is hard to work for! Kabbalah is weird! And other than that, the proposed book seems to actually be about Melissa Dumas and, who cares. However, there were a few interesting tidbits about the state of "M" and Guy Ritchie's union, though. Like most married couples, they rarely share a bed.
Put on your reading glasses, because it's time for another literary journey into the highbrow world of Courtney Love, via her "book," Dirty Blonde. Now, maybe you've seen the documentary and you think you know all there is to know about Kurt and Courtney's relationship. Well, do you know Courtney's innermost, most high-sounding and disjointed thoughts about it? Ok, maybe. Well, do you know what Frances Bean's first word was? Not unless you've traveled with us past the jump.
Ah, it's time again for our periodic exercise in fake erudition, made even faker this time by the fact that the book we're leafing through together is barely a book at all. No, it's Courtney Love's diary-thing, which, where it's legible, is fascinating in a perverse way. Lucky for you, we're good at deciphering Courtney Love's handwriting — it's one of our useless talents, right up there with being able to fit our entire fist into our mouth. Annnnyway. After the jump, C. Love engages in some J. Frey random Capitalization and we do our laughing at it thing.
It's time again to gather around the cheese plate and come up with some discussion group questions for our highly erudite examination of 'House of Hilton,' Jerry Oppenheimer's new 'whatever's left to expose' expos of Paris and her fam. Today, Jacob Bernstein's lengthy fluffing in WWD has us even more excited for this book's juicy tidbits. With our ritual flip-through, we hit Hilton gold right away. Or, well, pale yellow. Go ahead and slink shamefacedly along with us past the jump, won't you?
Celeb-bio machine Jerry Oppenheimer has outdone himself this time, giving the tell-all treatment to the entire Hilton dynasty — Paris, Nicky, Rick and Kathy, yes, but also apparently there was also this Conrad guy who owned a lot of hotels and some other guy, Nicky, who did it with Zsa Zsa Gabor or something. We skipped over those parts. Anyway, because there are entire square millimeters of Paris that haven't been fully exploited yet, we thought it was time for another edition of Gawker's treasured book club, a feature in which we flip around until we find a titillating passage and then share it with you. After the jump, learn what 'sex education' means to the Hiltons. Hint: not abstinence education, that's for sure.
