Last month I found myself on a Zoom call with the members of a book club who’d read my debut novel; truly, a bucket list moment in my writing life. Near the end of the call, someone asked the question I suspect every fiction writer gets at some point: Where do you get ideas from?
Simple, I said: I steal them. I was joking. Sort of.
"I did have problems with it as I now see the movie," actor Dustin Hoffman confessed to the BBC in 1970 as he reflected on his performance as the sickly New York grifter Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. "I can see where I am inconsistent in the character."
The film, released in cinemas on 25 May 1969, would go on to earn Oscar nominations for both Hoffman and his co-star Jon Voight, who played a naive young Texan with aspirations to be a rich woman's gigolo.
The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It’s serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change. If this turbulent, mercurial tale has an anchor, it is its belief that “in order to extend life and preserve civilisation, we are obliged to rescue one another”.
Ocean Vuong is one of my favorite novelists, because he is a poet. His long-anticipated sophomore novel, The Emperor of Gladness is an admirable compliment to his resume of work and widens his stance as an artist that continues to provide irreplaceable commentary on American life, speaking not to his readers, but through.
Throughout the book, one senses a tireless energy applied to dealmaking—and has a lingering impression that the thing being made, whether entertainment or dresses, is always a little less interesting than the money made by making it. And since, past a certain point, there’s not much more money to be made, the only thing left to innovate is the way you make it.