Books, 10/18.

Mark A Vieira has an undisputed eye for beauty, especially the glamorized beauty of Hollywood's golden studio era," writes Michael Guillén. "A portrait photographer, film historian, and the author of four previous volumes - Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, Hollywood Horror: From Gothic to Cosmic and Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy, all published by Harry N Abrams, Inc - Vieira graciously forwarded me his latest Abrams publication, Hollywood Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M, and I've been admittedly ensorcelled by Vieira's stunning selection of previously unpublished photographs and his informative and revelatory commentary."

"Now we have the long-called-for companion to David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975 and throughout its various editions the most seductive, infuriating, and influential reference book ever written on the movies." Benjamin Schwarz in the Atlantic: "Have You Seen...? - a by turns astringent and gushy appraisal of 1,000 movies made from 1895 to 2007 - is, for better and worse, something of a muddle. Whereas the lyrical and bullying, ardent and Olympian, minutely detailed and defiantly impressionistic Dictionary, with its closely packed, tightly printed, double-columned pages, aims toward the comprehensive, this work discriminates in what it includes and what it doesn't - but does so using several different and somewhat contradictory criteria."

David Thomson himself reviews Joseph Epstein's Fred Astaire, "a very readable and glowing 50,000-word portrait, notwithstanding Epstein's determination not to subject Fred to rough cross- examination or prolonged background scrutiny.... [A]n Astaire virgin might do better to spend the $22 on a DVD of Top Hat or Swing Time or even Silk Stockings.... Better still, the fan or the inspired newcomer needs to hunt down John Mueller's Astaire Dancing (1985), a big volume that analyzes (with frame enlargements) his every dance number on film; there we learn that in the years at RKO, the Astaire-Rogers films more than doubled in cost without showing the same expansiveness in income. I stress that because it's clear from Mueller's book - though not much explored by Epstein - that Astaire (and his choreographer, critic, stand-in, friend, shadow, Hermes Pan) really made these films."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Joe Eszterhas's 16 movies have grossed something like $1 billion. Anne Rice's novels have sold something like 75 million copies. So when writers with this economic mojo write memoirs about their return to the Roman Catholic faith of their childhood, attention must, and perhaps should, be paid." Christopher Buckley, who's been in the news himself in the past few days, reviews the screenwriter's Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith and the novelist's Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.

• Dan Bilefsky has the latest on the Milan Kundera controversy, zeroing in on the parallels between accusations that the author, when he was 21, tipped Czechoslovakia's Communist police off on the whereabouts of a friend of a friend who was believed to have been spying for the West and Kundera's first novel, The Joke (adapted in 1969 by Jaromil Jires).

• "Roald Dahl is famous for his mischievous children's stories," writes Jacob Heilbrunn. "But as Jennet Conant reports in The Irregulars, he was also a British spy."

"The author of the book that inspired the prize-winning movie Gomorrah announced... that he was leaving Italy after spending almost two years under close protection," reports John Hooper from Rome. "Roberto Saviano disclosed his decision to the newspaper La Repubblica after reports in the Italian media that the mobsters he denounced in his book had a plan for his assassination by Christmas at the latest." Meanwhile, as the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, Saviano's received the Frankfurt Book Fair Award for Best Literary Adaptation.

Back in the Guardian: "After an 'emotionally draining' and closely fought final judging session, Aravind Adiga, one of the two debut novelists on the Man Booker shortlist, was last night awarded the £50,000 prize for The White Tiger, a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India," reports Charlotte Higgins. Stuart Jeffries talks with the author and the Guardian's also running an exclusive, one of Adiga's short stories, "The Sultan's Battery."

All these goings on make the Guardian's "week in books" roundup a more necessary read than usual.

"Almost lost amid all the awards chatter of late (the Nobel gave way to the Booker gave way to the National Book Award nominees) was the announcement from Germany that Uwe Tellkamp has won that country's hottest book prize for Der Turm (The Tower), his 1,000-page novel about the fall of Communism in East Germany," notes Gregory Cowles in the NYT's Paper Cuts.

And the AP reports that "Spanish writer, philosopher and political activist Fernando Savater has won the Premio Planeta literary award for a detective novel about a missing jockey," La Hermandad de la Buena Suerte.

Gilbert Cruz talks with Tony Curtis for Time about American Prince.

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2008 9:30 AM