Candid, Hilarious, and Fascinating

If you ever make it to the back page of Vanity Fair, you're probably familiar with the "Proust questionnaire."

We recently acquired a compilation of these illuminating VF interviews:


Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.

Simply put, it's a hoot.

One of my favorite respondents is artist Tom Waits (November, 2004):

On what occasion do you lie?
Who needs an occasion?

Which talent would you most like to have?
Being able to fix the truck.

What is your favorite occupation?
Blacksmith, ventriloquist, magician, jockey, train conductor, tree surgeon, and lion tamer.

What do you most value in your friends?
Jumper cables and a tow chain.

How would you like to die?
I don't think I would like it very much at all.

An archive of questionnaires can be found on VF's site.

The Enduring Culture of Celebrity

Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil, has published a new novel, Sunnyside--available now as an audiobook.

The publisher's description reads as follows:

[O]n a winter day in 1916 ... Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world's last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America's doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vice of complications--studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.

The Onion's A.V. Club gives this book and its "mighty panorama" an A-. Library Journal calls it "another joyous comic novel."