Fame Featured in Newsweek: “Dying to Live Forever”

Click to read about Tom Payne’s Fame in ”Dying to Live Forever” (Newsweek)

Nothing seems more modern than society’s relentless obsession with reality-show stars, Hollywood tweets, and tabloid scandals. But a wildly entertaining new book by former Daily Telegraph literary editor Tom Payne suggests that our celebrity culture has rather old roots. In Fame, Payne draws provocative parallels between 21st-century stardom and the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs to explore how the fame game has evolved over the millennia.”

Fame was also recently reviewed in Library Journal:

Payne knows his literature and his modern culture, and he deftly draws some astounding parallels between these classical figures and today’s celebrities as well as audiences both past and present who invest their idols with power but can rob them of privacy, dignity, and even fame.

Verdict: This one-of-a-kind book looks at current society’s responses to celebrities from a highly literate and astute perspective. It is well written and accessible enough to have appeal beyond academic audiences, and it warrants a second read by those who would like to absorb more fully the finer points of its thesis.”

Previously:

• Interview: Tom Payne in Newsweek. Click to read “How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs”

“Megastars like Lady Gaga, he argues, are elevated to the status of demigods—but we demand sacrifices from them in return (their image, their privacy). ‘The crowd wants something, and anindividual is prepared to give it to them,’ Payne writes, and the whole affair is often tinged with ‘collective cruelty.’ It’s not so different from how the Aztecs liked to select a sacrificial victim, worship her as a deity, and then cut out her heart in front of a rapt crowd.”

• Radio: Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes)
• Radio: Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities”– KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour)

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

“Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

“Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  ”Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”