1. Hear Lauren Weisberger read from The Devil Wears Prada. (No Anna Wintour sightings there.)
2. See John Newman's "Monkey Wrenches and Household Saints" exhibit at the Von Lintel Gallery. (Opens today, 6-8PM.)
3. Catch a preview of the surefire hit production of O'Neill's Long Day�s Journey Into Night, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard.
Shameless but relevant self-promotion: I interviewed Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada (a roman a clef about Vogue editor Anna Wintour) on Monday for Salon. Lauren, on the book: "It's a beach read; this is not great literature. We all know that."
When personal assistants attack! [Salon]
The Observer reports that Vogue's Aimee Cho sent out a mass email indicating that Anna Wintour was looking for a new assistant. "The magazine, she said, was looking for people 'who have not read The Devil Wears Prada'" (Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about her year at Vogue as Anna Wintour's assistant.) [Disclosure: I interviewed Lauren on Monday. The article will run tomorrow at Salon.com]
Off the record [Observer]
From Lauren Weisberger's (roman-a-clef about Vogue) The Devil Wears Prada: "...I recognized the description immediately from a New Yorker article I'd just read. It seemed the entire book world was eagerly anticipating his next contribution and couldn't shut about the realism wiith which he depicts his heroine...The critics had gone crazy over the first book, hailing it as one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century...The New Yorker piece had included an interview in which the author had called Christian "a force for years to come" in the book industry, but one with "a hell of a look, a killer style, and enough natural charm that would ensurein the unlikely event that his literary success did nota lifetime of success with the ladies."
The Gothamist is starting a campaign against The Devil Wears Prada author and former Vogue employee, Lauren Weisberger. "Gothamist thinks that Weisberger is dumb as a brick for thinking that she'd have a byline right out of school. And, Christ, you can't wake up to get to work early and make a good impression in order to try and move higher in the pecking order? At a competitive, cutthroat company?" Our take is a slight variation on that theme: How naive do you have to be to sign up to work for [Vogue Editor] Anna Wintour, expecting that she's going to be nice to you? She's Anna Wintour, for god's sake! Of course she's going to abuse you! It's her job!
Gothamist hates Lauren Weisberger [Gothamist]
Kate Betts, the former Editor-in-Chief of Harper's Bazaar, reviews The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about working at Vogue under editor Anna Wintour. Betts tears into Weisberger, criticizing her for the character's (read: Weisberger's) superiority complex: "Andrea makes no bones about the fashion business being beneath her, or that her true calling is not to be fetching tall lattes for Anna/Miranda but to be supplying high-minded prose for The New Yorker."
The NYT examines a series of fashion novels that appear to have some basis in reality:
· Gini Alhadeff's new book, Diary of a Djinn, revolves around a protagonist that bears a striking resemblance to Giorgio Armani.
· The Devil Wears Prada, due out in June, was written by Anna Wintour's former assistant, Lauren Weisberger.
· Caroline Hwang's In Full Bloom is the story of a young Korean-American woman climbing the designer corporate ladder in the fashion mag world.
· Ex-Vanity Fair editor, Laura Jacobs, chronicles the social-climbing exploits of two New Yorkers in the design and media industries in her book, Women About the Town.
· Plum Sykes' book, Bergdorf Blondes, sounds suspiciously autobiographical.
A tyrant from Milan leads a parade of fashion novels [NYT]
