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She was born during the Jazz Age and grew up in Paris and the American Midwest after her father’s death on the polo field and her mother’s later suicide. As a young war reporter, she waded ashore on Omaha Beach and witnessed the liberation of Dachau. She spent the 1950s hobnobbing in Hollywood with Marlene Dietrich and Gene Kelly. She went to West Africa as an Ambassador’s wife as Jack Kennedy’s Camelot dawned.

She comforted a distraught LBJ in Washington, DC, as the Vietnam war turned into a quagmire. And today? Today, it’s June 6, 2006: Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller’s 86th birthday. With some asperity, she’s waiting for a congratulatory phone call from the President of the United States. Brother, is he ever going to get a piece of her mind.

Editorial Reviews

“Who could have predicted the daughter of Tom and Daisy Buchanan would find herself, at the age of 86, a crotchety, irreverent, foul-mouthed blogger living in Washington, DC, nursing an obsession for Kirstin Dunst? Or that her life would intersect, scandalously, with Lyndon Baines Johnson? Or that Nick Carraway would find religion? By the time you finish reading this trippy, hilarious, brilliant meta-memoir of a novel, you may need a refresher in 20th Century history to parse fact from fiction.” - Susan Coll, author of Beach Week, Acceptance and Rockville Pike

There beyond the groves of West Egg, in a secret corner of Gatsby s mansion, is an unmarked door onto the loony American century of this dazzling novel. Once again Tom Carson commits an extravagant act of imagination — magnificently written, and as seditious and blindingly smart as it is irresistible and laugh-out-loud fun. – Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Our Ecstatic Days

” ‘Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter’ is an acute, hilarious and moving vision of the 20th century as refracted through two unique sensibilities: that of its indefatigable narrator, and that of the supremely witty, deeply wise, and endlessly playful writer who dreamed her up.” –Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies/Some Came Running

Take a skippy, dizzy, dazzling joyride with a chick who cracks the East and West Eggs wide open. The old lady holding the gun and the keyboard may be Daisy Buchanan s daughter, but she s the stylish stepchild of Nabokov, blogging about what happened after Fitzgerald set down his pen. Her own wild adventures literary, sexual, historical anticipate a fateful phone call from one of the great villains of recent years. Pammie is the dame-iest of dames, and this is the rompiest of reads. Huzzah! – Susann Cokal, author of Mirabilis and Breath and Bones

“In this inventive and masterful novel, Tom Carson takes us inside the privileged post-Gatsby world of the iconic Buchanans, bringing to bear his exquisite and confident imagination as he presents the world of Daisy Buchanan’s daughter–a world no less fraught and socially dangerous than the one in which Fitzgerald s characters roamed. Carson’s skill with multiple voices brilliantly illuminates the kaleidoscopic sense of identity one invariably finds in a brittle milieu. The reader will be captivated.” – Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses and A Brief History of Camouflage

“She is the first great literary character of the new millennium, and her all-encompassing story is some sort of crazy masterpiece.” James Hynes, author of Next and The Lecturer’s Tale
“Tom Carson s unforgettable heroine escapes from The Great Gatsby to take us on a tour-de-force guided tour of the past century, from flipped-out flappers to Dubya s dream of the orgastic future.” – John Powers, Critic at Large for NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross”

Review

Amaze your book club with your perspicacity and have them read Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter ahead of the New York Sunday Times review, which is said to be due out in late June. Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is the purportive autobiography of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s daughter (although maybe she’s Jay Gatsby’s) as she lives the life of a post modern woman, from landing at Omaha Beach as a combat correspondent to life on Upper Connecticut as an aged but aware doyenne in the Harriman mold. Along the way, in this very very funny novel, we learn the Post WWII American dream with infinite and loving attention to detail and character sketches of dozens of twentieth century figures. In scope and sweep it most closely resembles Dos Passos USA, in the unconditional love the author shows for his protaganist in all phases of her life, it is evocative of Anna Karenina. The narrative voice and driving rhythym of the syntax are appropriate for a Keroauc endless scroll. But most of all the humor reminds me of a harmonic counterpart to George MacDonald Fraser’s mythic misogynistic Flashman.

Carson is a little known author (Gilligan’s Wake) and a well known, indeed, perhaps the leading, film critic, currently writing for GQ. He puts his encyclopedic knowledge of history and social referents to use for us throughout this book.

For me it is too bad that the economics of publishing will introduce most readers to this book through the Kindle. I myself like to read books of this scope and episodic detail (it is 600 something pages long!) by skipping around and then going back to connect the dots in a straight read, and I would encourage readers to order the trade paper version until they are forced to reprint. I actually liked the first few pages least of all the book. Enjoy! – Kajetan, Amazon.Com Customer Review

‘The Great Gatsby’: The Next Generation

The New York Times Book Review – June 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

When readers met Pamela Buchanan in the pages of “The Great Gatsby,” she was about 2 years old. As “Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter” opens, she is in her 80s, waiting for a birthday call from President George W. Bush, during which she intends to blow her brains out to protest the Iraq war. While waiting, she blogs. Through a suicide note that eventually becomes an autobiography almost perfectly contemporary with “the American Century,” we learn that Pam has been many things: rich mother’s regret, successful author, war correspondent, diplomat’s wife. She was on the beach at Normandy, saw Dachau liberated and knew the Kennedys.

Such subjects can call for a light hand. Most “Gatsby” characters play surprisingly short roles in this novel, but Pam’s truncated relationship with her mother is especially moving: Daisy, trapped in a loveless second marriage, becomes an addict and, finally, a suicide. Pam recalls with sadness her childish cruelty to a clearly unfulfilled and unhappy woman. Tom Carson even manages to bring tenderness to Pam’s unlikely platonic affair with a beleaguered Lyndon Johnson, and to her improbable meetings over the years with a former Dachau inmate.

In fact, implausibility is Carson’s most powerful tool, for “Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter” is a picaresque, and as such has a duty to travel by whatever madcap means available. Carson — the film critic for GQ and the author of the novel “Gilligan’s Wake” — gives himself wholeheartedly to scouring Pam’s lifetime for iconic moments and succeeds: Pam edged out for the Pulitzer by Jack Kennedy, Pam with Johnson’s head in her lap before his speech forestalling nomination, Pam in a Hollywood both seedy and glamorous, Pam at D-Day. . . . For our purposes, Pam is America, and once, for better or worse, America was everywhere. [Read the full article...]

Book World review: ‘Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter’ wittily chronicles 20th century

The Washington Post Book World Review – July 26, 2011 (Excerpt)

You’re unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year than Tom Carson’s latest, a satiric revue of the dearly departed American Century starring an 86-year-old woman who saw it all. The daughter of that charmer whose “voice is full of money,” as gold-hatted Gatsby said of Daisy, Pamela Buchanan tells what happened after the last mournful pages of “The Great Gatsby”: how her mother became a morphine addict and died in Belgium; her boarding-school days under the guardianship of kindly Nick Carraway (who is contemplating writing a novel about his late West Egg neighbor); and then her Zelig-like participation in some defining moments in the 20th century.

She describes Broadway theater life in the late ’40s; the home front and Europe during World War II — she was on Omaha Beach on D-Day; Hollywood in the early ’50s as it transitioned from the big screen to the little home version; Camelot as seen from West Africa in the early ’60s as an ambassador’s wife; and then Washington, D.C., for the latter half of her life. She comforts Lyndon Johnson during the final days of his presidency, spars with Norman Mailer before the March on the Pentagon in 1967, and shakes her increasingly gray head at what follows in “Potusville” until her 86th birthday on June 6, 2006, the long day on which this novel takes place. [Read the full article...]

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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When Princess Diana died in Paris’s Alma tunnel, she was thirty-seven years old. Had she lived, she would turn fifty on July 1, 2011. Who would the beloved icon be if she were alive today? What would she be doing? And where? One of the most versatile and bold writers of our time, Monica Ali has imagined a different fate for Diana in her spectacular new novel, Untold Story.

Diana’s life and marriage were both fairy tale and nightmare rolled into one. Adored by millions, she suffered rejection, heartbreak, and betrayal. Surrounded by glamour and glitz and the constant attention of the press, she fought to carve a meaningful role for herself in helping the needy and dispossessed. The contradictions and pressures of her situation fueled her increasingly reckless behavior, but her stature and her connection with her public never ceased to grow. If Diana had lived, would she ever have found peace and happiness, or would the curse of fame always have been too great?

Fast forward a decade after the (averted) Paris tragedy, and an Englishwoman named Lydia is living in a small, nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She has a circle of friends: one owns a dress shop; one is a Realtor; another is a frenzied stay-at-home mom. Lydia volunteers at an animal shelter, and swims a lot. Her lover, who adores her, feels she won’t let him know her. Who is she?

Untold Story is about the cost of celebrity, the meaning of identity, and the possibility—or impossibility—of reinventing a life. Ali’s fictional princess is beautiful, intrepid, and resourceful and has established a fragile peace. And then the past threatens to destroy her new life. Ali has created a riveting novel inspired by the cultural icon she calls “a gorgeous bundle of trouble.”

Editorial Reviews

“Monica Ali has always been a brilliant and provocative writer, but Untold Story is not only a gripping read but a compassionate portrait of a woman in turmoil–her finest novel yet.”–Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

“Haunting and intensely readable, this is something between a thriller and a ghost story.” —Lady Antonia Fraser

“A terrific, clever, multi-layered and subtle book (and let’s not forget – hugely entertaining!).”—Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat and Blueeyedboy

“A masterpiece of suspense… This is a startlingly intelligent, perceptive and entertaining piece of fiction. It’s quite brilliant.”—Daily Mirror (UK)

“Thoughtful, compassionate… A suspenseful and gripping read.”—Financial Times

“Ali’s third-person princess is a very convincing and sympathetic figure… Extremely skillfully done.”—Observer (UK)

“Builds to a thrilling and rewarding finish… Daring and engrossing.”—Booklist (starred review)

“It is always said that Princess Diana was hunted and haunted, that her story contained the seeds of a contemporary myth. It was obvious that only the imagination of a first-rate novelist could master that material and make it fully and unforgettably alive. We now have the book we have been waiting for in Monica Ali’s Untold Story. It is a beautiful, gripping accomplishment, a treat for the heart and the head, and will be a joy to readers who believe in the possibility that a book can transform your basic sense of life.”—Andrew O’Hagan, Booker-shortlisted author of Our Fathers, Be Near Me and The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog

Imagining a Secret Life for Diana

The New York Times Book Review – June 13, 2011 (Excerpt)

Staging one’s own death or disappearance, or switching identities with someone else: it’s not just a premise of witness protection (and witness protection comedies like “Bird on a Wire”), but it’s also the catalyst of classic works like Antonioni’s landmark film “The Passenger” and Anthony Minghella’s Hitchcockian thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Not to mention a fantasy of anyone who has ever imagined ditching all the emotional baggage and obligations accumulated over the years and starting over, tabula rasa.

Now suppose that the individual who has vanished is the most famous woman in the world: Diana, Princess of Wales — superstar, fashion plate, good Samaritan, publicly cheated-on wife (and vice versa), a woman who dragged Britain’s monarchy into the modern age, and whose marriage, divorce and every move were minutely and relentlessly chronicled by the media.

Suppose Diana did not die in a car crash in Paris in 1997, but sick and tired of her life in the tabloid fishbowl, devised a “little plan” to disappear: while vacationing on a boyfriend’s yacht, she would take an early morning swim and never return; the world would assume she had drowned or been eaten by sharks, and she would be free to reinvent herself abroad.

This is the hypothesis that Monica Ali sets forth in her potboiler of a new novel, “Untold Story.” For Ms. Ali — who was named by Granta in 2003 as one of Britain’s 20 best young novelists and whose first novel, “Brick Lane,” was on the shortlist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize — it seems like an awfully high-concept, low-brow endeavor, especially given the much-talked-about rollout of the novel in Britain just weeks before the wedding of Diana’s son William, when fascination with the royals was hitting another high. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘Untold Story’ by Monica Ali

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – July 17, 2011 (Excerpt)

Fairy tales are the Euclidian geometry of fiction. Reading them — and having them read to us — are the moments when we first divide reality. We teach our imagination to leap, hit the ground and keep on running. We willingly take that leap — children, adults and everyone between carrying that tiny grain of disbelief in the “real” world of facts and plunge instead into a world of fables.

So Monica Ali’s “Untold Story,” a novel of “what if,” will come as no surprise. It is based on the idea that Princess Diana staged her own death and ran away, most painfully from her two boys, to create another life. One wonders, why didn’t someone write this novel sooner? After all, few of us believed the car crash in the Paris tunnel in 1997 that killed the princess was a simple story. Many of us disbelieved at least some of the facts, beginning with the princess is dead and ending with the explanation that it was an accident.

When she appears in Ali’s novel—in the little American town of Kensington, working at the Kensington Canine Sanctuary, living alone in a pretty house with a pool (the real Diana was a swimmer), with a few friends and a regular suburban life—we do not have to leap too far to believe. The middle-American town, like so many, is sprinkled with British names: Kensington, Albert Street, Victoria Street. The princess calls herself Lydia Snaresbrook, a name that her co-conspirator, Lawrence Standing (her private secretary in the old life), found for her.

“Untold Story” begins 10 years after the accident, in 2007, though in Ali’s telling the princess chose death by drowning, perhaps a shark attack, off Brazil where she was vacationing with her lover. Lydia has a new lover; he is not a sheik, not a bodyguard, not a tennis pro, no, he is a kind, patient, simple man, a claims adjuster for an insurance company, and he knows nothing of Lydia’s past. [Read the full article...]

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Almost Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

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An entirely new kind of biography, Built of Books explores the mind and personality of Oscar Wilde through his taste in books

This intimate account of Oscar Wilde’s life and writings is richer, livelier, and more personal than any book available about the brilliant writer, revealing a man who built himself out of books. His library was his reality, the source of so much that was vital to his life. A reader first, his readerly encounters, out of all of life’s pursuits, are seen to be as significant as his most important relationships with friends, family, or lovers. Wilde’s library, which Thomas Wright spent twenty years reading, provides the intellectual (and emotional) climate at the core of this deeply engaging portrait.

One of the book’s happiest surprises is the story of the author’s adventure reading Wilde’s library. Reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional hero who enters Cervantes’s mind by saturating himself in the culture of sixteenth-century Spain, Wright employs Wilde as his own Virgilian guide to world literature. We come to understand how reading can be an extremely sensual experience, producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight.

Editorial Reviews

“Entertaining and highly original, Oscar’s Books is animated by a real intellectual passion. It should be read by anyone interested in Wilde or in the art of literary biography.”
— Peter Ackroyd

“No other scholar of Wilde has succeeded so well in moving into Oscar’s head.”
— Irish Times

Review

When still in school Thomas Wright resolved to read all the books Oscar Wilde had read, and although he admits at the end of this book that he didn’t succeed, he did read enough of them to write this fascinating account of Oscar Wilde’s life through Wilde’s abiding passion, books.

Wright’s book opens with the tragic sale of Wilde’s library to pay his debts following his imprisonment in 1895 and then moves on to give an account of his upbringing in Dublin with the Celtic folk tales his mother loved. In Dublin’s Trinity College Wilde met his mentor in Greek studies, Professor Mahaffy, and in Trinity and Oxford’s Magdalen College, Wilde expanded his reading into the classics of the Latin and Greek civilizations, such as Livy, Euripides and Homer. From there Wright takes us through Wilde settling in London, his marriage in 1883, home life, and fine library in Tite Street, laid out and decorated to Wilde’s exacting aesthetic requirements.

In 1891 Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas and their mutual searches for rentboys on the streets near London’s House of Commons began. Their relationship revolted Bosie’s father, the volatile and unstable Lord Queensbury, and when Queensbury publicly accused Wilde of sodomy Wilde, at Bosie’s prompting, prosecuted Queensbury for criminal libel. It was a fatal mistake. Queensbury’s counsel, Wilde’s fellow Dubliner and future leader of Ulster Unionism, Edward Carson, cleverly trapped Wilde in his own eloquence and allowed him incriminate himself. Not only did Wilde’s prosecution collapse but Wilde found himself being prosecuted for his homosexuality. He was convicted and Wright recounts Wilde’s terrible imprisonment and concludes his story with Wilde’s final years, the collapse of his creative drive and lonely death in Paris surrounded by his last few hundred books, including works by Balzac, Huysmans, and Flaubert’s ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony.’

The story is entertainingly told through the books Wilde was reading and writing about, from his favourites, such as Pater’s `Studies in the History of the Renaissance’, to the books he scornfully derided such as the now forgotten Harry Quilter’s `Sententiae Artis’ a book of bourgeois art criticism. Wright includes in his tale interesting accounts of Wilde’s library, reading habits – Wilde’s was a prodigious intelligence and his ability to read in Latin, Greek and numerous European languages impresses no less than his ability to read a book in detail in a matter of minutes – book designs, favourite book shops and numerous other details of his bookish life which will rivet the attention of any bibliophile and give him many hours of entertaining reading and many ideas for further reading.

There’s little to criticize in this book but at times the author’s obvious enthusiasm gets the better of him and he offers conjectures on Wilde’s life with little basis in fact, even going so far as to speculate, incredibly, that Wilde may have intended his downfall as a form of Greek tragedy.

In addition to Wright’s own easy writing style, the book is laced with great lines from Wilde himself. What reader who has waded through the sickly sentimentality of Dickens will not erupt in laughter when he reads Wilde’s comment `One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ And, appropriately, the best line in the book is Wilde’s, when he said, in reference to the Bible `When I think of all the harm that book has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it.’ – Brian McMahon, Amazon Customer Review

Well, it was back on January 31, 2010 when my wife broke the news to me during breakfast while she was reading the local newspaper. “Your girlfriend is scheduled to co-host ‘The View’,” she told me, hiding her grin behind the paper. “Veronica?” I asked, decently surprised. “Yes,” she answered, “Victoria Beckham, indeed.”

Well, it is very obvious that Victoria – or “Veronica” as I call her affectionately – Beckham is not my girlfriend, but every now and then the little lie comes in handy at occasions when I refuse to explain to my wife where I had been, or where I was about to go. Such occasions include shopping for Valentine’s Day and similar, innocent activities. “I’m going to see Veronica,” I would tell my wife, and she knows enough not to ask any further. “You wish,” is her usual response.

In fact, I don’t know much about the former Spice Girl besides being married to soccer superstar David Beckham. Sometimes my wife needs to point her out to me when she appears on TV. However, one little fact about Victoria Beckham was stuck in my brain for several years. In 2005, despite “writing” a 528-page autobiography, she admitted that she had never read a book in her life.

Now, think about this for a minute. A woman, who admitted she had never read a book in her life, is going to be a guest co-host of a live weekday talk show (The regular co-hosts include Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and Sherri Shepherd.)

I couldn’t help but to verify the information, and I found a brief article on HuffingtonPost.com. Then I logged on to YouTube.com to watch a clip of her guest appearance on The View in September of 2009. I endured the swooning about her spike-heeled shoes and the grey dress she had designed herself. She also admitted that she would not wear such a dress in an airplane; she usually changes right after she enters the plane.

That was not only the point where I, decently disgusted, stopped the clip, but also started wondering about the bizarre world of celebrity.

It would have been interesting to watch the show – Sorry, I missed it – and see how Victoria dealt with her new role where she might have to prepare for topics other than fashion and music. The question is, how would she handle, for instance, Dan Brown talking about his latest novel, The Lost Symbol? After all, the movie is not out yet.

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Vampire Ascending

by Lorelei Bell

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.