Book

Fame, By Tom Payne

A Picador Paperback Original
978-0-312-42993-5
$16.00 // 256 pages

Publication date:
November 1, 2010

Fame will be available for purchase where good books are sold, including:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
IndieBound
Powell’s

About FAME:

In this erudite, acidly funny book, Tom Payne discovers in the constellation of our celebrity culture distinct parallels between the immortals of Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides, and the glittery personalities in your copy of People magazine.

We may treat celebrities like deities, but that doesn’t mean we worship them with deference. Is it possible that humanity, from pre-history to the present, has possessed a primal urge to first exalt the famous, and to then sacrifice them? Are there similarities between the rise and fall of Michael Jackson and the ancient Greek practice of Ostracism, between Tiger Woods and Achilles, Farah Fawcett and St. Felicity, Heath Ledger and Dr. Faustus?  From Greek mythology to the stories of Christian martyrs, Payne makes the fascinating argument that our relationship to celebrity is perilous, and that we wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this brilliant book, Payne brings new life to the past and all of the characters from your high school literature class. Here the most ephemeral reality television stars (the “famous for being famous”) occupy the same VIP lounge as the characters of The Iliad, and Payne shows that the people we choose as our heroes and villains throughout the ages says much about ourselves.

A dazzling and often hilarious look at the mortals, and the immortals—us and them.

Praise for FAME:

“Accounts of celebrities are usually either sneering or gushing––or both simultaneously, those attitudes being two sides of the same coin. Tom Payne’s wonderfully witty and erudite study of modern fame in the light of ancient myths and rituals is markedly kinder and more balanced, and yet also more unsettling…. For all its charm and wit, Payne’s book left this reader with an abiding sense of horror. Do we really still live in a world of bloodstained altars?”

—Christopher Hart, Sunday Times (UK)

“Payne explains [ideas] with tremendous gusto, humour and many flashes of self-knowing irony. There is also something strangely satisfying in seeing the theories of learned classicists used to explain the fate of rock stars and other assorted pin-ups of popular culture…. FAME is a good read.”

—Mary Beard, Guardian (UK)

“Payne draws easily on the classical world and its myths and rituals to illuminate the celebrity deifications of our modern era… This is the great consolation of this book. It allows you to catch up with the steamy, trashy gossip of today without the accompanying pangs of guilt. It’s like reading Grazia, but feels as worthy as memorizing Homer.”

—Harry de Quetteville, The Daily Telegraph (UK)