If you missed Tom Payne’s excellent interview with Neal Conan on NPR‘s “Talk of the Nation,” be sure to listen here. (aired 12/29/10) A nice review of Fame ran on The Atlantic.com on December 27th — read here. And Toby Young reviewed Fame in The Wall Street Journal on December 27th, concluding that “Fame is [...]
A rave review from Caroline Weber in The New York Times Book Review: “In his trenchant, unsettling, darkly hilarious FAME, Tom Payne…examines the murky pact that binds stars to their public…. Moving seamlessly between yesterday’s great literature—Greek, Roman, early Christian, Enlightenment and Romantic—and today’s trashy tabloids, Payne advances a persuasive, if disturbing, definition of what [...]
Popcropolis loves Britain. In fact (you might have realised) Popcropolis is a British export, as British as Hugh Grant, or Hugh Laurie, or blackberry and apple pie. As a result, I’m sure that you’ll join this loyal British subject in being cockahoop about the forthcoming royal nuptials. Here in Britain, we are thrilled, of course, [...]
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 [...]
Click here to read Tom Payne’s Newsweek Interview: “How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs” Excerpt: “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, [...]
Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes): Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities” – KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour): Previously: Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club: Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult [...]
Click here to read the full review – Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review) Excerpt: “[...] Fame isn’t a simple reduction of modern celebrity culture to we’ve-seen-this-before status, or a cheap attempt to fuse philosophy to the flavor of the month. Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly [...]
Tom Payne has a new piece up in The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog: “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian” Previously: 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 [...]
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 [...]
