I know he’s not really called Piers Warning, but I presume you know whom I’m talking about. In the London Times last weekend he whooped about being a one-name celebrity, “like Madonna”. You do know about Piers Morgan, right? I ask because I’m British, and know almost all about him. But when I was revising [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Want a Fame galley before it goes on sale October 26th? Like Popcropolis on Facebook and post a comment on the wall — first 15 will get one!* 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 [...]
