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    Test Your Knowledge of French Novels Made Into Musicals and Movies

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    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge is focused on globally popular French novels that went on to become big-screen adventures — and more. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and some of their filmed versions. More

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      in Television

      What’s Next for ‘Love Island’ Contestant Jeremiah Brown? A Book Club.

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      Jeremiah Brown asked his 2 million TikTok followers what to do after being voted off the hit series. The answer has him, and his fans, reading “The Song of Achilles.”After he was voted off the dating show “Love Island USA” last month, Jeremiah Brown wasn’t sure what to do with his newfound fame.During his 16 days as a contestant, he’d gained more than two million followers on TikTok, up from just 44 before he went on the show. Shortly after his exit, a suggestion from a follower on social media immediately grabbed him.“Somebody said, you should start a book club, and I was like, oh my gosh, lightbulb,” Brown said in an interview. “The second I read this idea, I was like yeah, we got to do this.”When Brown posted about his book club in early July, the announcement generated wild enthusiasm. Soon, the club had around 120,000 members.“Y’all some nerds,” Brown told his followers.After polling club members on what genre they wanted to read (romance, naturally), Brown gave them a list of books to vote on, which included BookTok favorites like “It Ends With Us,” “Beach Read,” “Twisted Love” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” The winner, by several thousand votes, was “The Song of Achilles,” by Madeline Miller.The novel, which is more of an epic tragedy than a romance, has already attracted a wide audience, selling more than 4 million copies since its release in 2012. Set during the Trojan War, it imagines a doomed love affair between the warrior Achilles and his devoted companion Patroclus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Bring the House Down,’ by Charlotte Runcie

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      Drawing on her own experience as an arts journalist, Charlotte Runcie comically skewers bad men, bad faith and (unforgivably) bad theater.BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, by Charlotte RuncieHow cruel may a critic be? I ask for a friend.David Niven was once dismissed as “tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.” (He hung the review in his bathroom.) John Simon described Barbra Streisand’s nose in “A Star Is Born” as “a ziggurat made of meat” bisecting the screen like “a bolt of fleshy lightning.”Having never gone further than calling an actor confused or miscast, I find such put-downs shocking. But they pale in comparison to Alex Lyons’s review of Hayley Sinclair in a one-woman Edinburgh Festival Fringe production called “Climate Emergence-She.” After disemboweling the script, Lyons turns his attention to its author and star. “Hayley herself is so tedious, and so derivative,” he writes, “that after you’ve endured the first 10 minutes of what the venue is loosely calling ‘a show,’ you’ll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.”Should Lyons, the lead critic at a major British newspaper, be canceled for that? How about if, in the hours between writing the pan and its publication, he picks up Sinclair at a bar and sleeps with her? She reads her one-star review in the morning, not knowing until then that the man she spent the night with was its author.And does it change the moral calculus if Lyons was right? The show sounds truly dreadful.Those are the questions heating up Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” which enjoyably pours fuel on both his and her sides of the dispute. Lyons is basically a #MeToo straw man, so grossly cavalier and indifferent to the sensitivity of other people, especially women, that you’d want to cancel him just for existing.Nor does Runcie make Sinclair a shining heroine. In a canny and commercial act of revenge, the character instantly revamps “Climate Emergence-She” as “The Alex Lyons Experience,” dredging up the history of the critic’s indiscretions and releasing the monster of internet rage. With its parade of guest star exes and its bonus semi-nudity, the new show is the hit the old one could never be.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares95 Views

      in Theater

      A Retelling of the Mahabharata, Set to Modern-Day Struggles

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      At Lincoln Center, the Toronto-based theater company Why Not strives to balance the old and new in its production of the Sanskrit epic.The Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata has been adapted many times over in oral retellings, plays, movies, comic books and more. Consisting of over 100,000 verses, the poem has so many stories that picking which ones to tell is a statement in itself.And making that decision can pose its own challenges as Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes, co-artistic directors of the Toronto-based theater company Why Not, learned when they went about adapting it. Now they are bringing their expansive two-part contemporary staging, which premiered in 2023 at the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, to Lincoln Center, where it will run from Tuesday through June 29.Their adaptation is based on the poet Carole Satyamurti’s retelling of the epic, which, at its core, is the story of two warring sets of cousins — the Kauravas and the Pandavas — trying to control a kingdom. The poem is part myth, part guide to upholding moral values and duty — or dharma. Some of the epic incorporates the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical text on Hindu morality, which is framed as a discussion between Prince Arjuna, a Pandava and a skilled archer, and Lord Krishna, a Hindu God who acts as Arjuna’s teacher.Jain, 45, began developing the piece in 2016 after receiving a $375,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the country’s public arts funder. Fernandes, 36, joined him on the project two years later after finishing graduate school in France. Jain described an early version of the script in an interview as “feminist” and “self-referential.” But the pandemic made them rethink which stories could best drive home the point of dharma — a central tenet of the text.Meher Pavri as an opera singer in the section drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. In the background, Neil D’Souza as the Hindu god Krishna and Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu as Prince Arjuna, Krishna’s pupil. David Cooper“To build a civilization, those with the most power must take care of those with the least,” Jain said, referring to the epic’s message. “In the animal kingdom, the strong eat the weak. There’s no problem with that. But humans have empathy, and we can build a civilization where we’re not just those who eat and those who are eaten, but rather those who feed and those who are fed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Comedy Samurai,’ the Writer-Director Larry Charles Tells Tales of Working on ‘Borat’ and ‘Curb’

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      Early in Larry Charles’s juicy showbiz memoir “Comedy Samurai,” he describes a formative moment writing for the television sketch show “Fridays.” Andy Kaufman was doing a bit with a masked magician swallowing a sword, only to spit up blood. “These were the laughs, the comedy, that I would try to pursue all my life,” Charles writes. “The deeper codes of comedy.”His book, a must-read for comedy nerds, is an account of nearly half of a century attempting to crack those codes, mostly as a director and writer, working with the most famous funny people in show business (Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld) and some of its most notorious bullies (Scott Rudin, the Weinstein brothers).Charles, 68, describes them all with entertaining candor, while also illuminating the creation of several of the greatest comedies of the modern era, including “Seinfeld” (he wrote for the first five seasons), “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (he directed episodes for two decades) and “Borat,” which he directed.His career, which began by selling a joke to Jay Leno, is a pocket history of modern comedy, anchored by surprisingly melancholy portraits of his two most fertile artistic relationships — with Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen. In a recent interview over Zoom, he reflected on the path from Coney Island to Hollywood.Besides Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen, Charles has also worked with Bill Maher, on the film “Religulous,” and Bob Dylan, on “Masked and Anonymous.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesYou grew up in Trump Village, a then new housing complex in Coney Island built by the President’s father, Fred. You meet him?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Match These Books to Their Movie Versions

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. With the summer-movie season here, this week’s challenge is focused on novels that went on to become big-screeen adventures. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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      in Music

      6 Hidden Shops in New York Worth Visiting

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      You didn’t come to New York to wander fluorescent aisles hunting for someone to unlock the fitting room. You came for the locked-door city — where nothing’s labeled, the elevator grumbles and whoever buzzes you in has already decided how the afternoon should go.You might leave with a sterling silver carabiner, a fossilized dinosaur foot or a record that makes everything else on your shelf sound flat. Or maybe it was just a book you didn’t know you were missing until it looked back at you.But don’t bother dropping by. These places don’t do foot traffic. You email. You call a landline. You wait. Maybe you DM. There’s no signage, no small talk, no piped-in jazz. What there is: hand-forged armor, prehistoric bones with six-figure price tags, music that’s never been digitized, a jewelry showroom with the logic of a toolbox, and — if you’re buzzed in — a private library (with all the books for sale) that reads like someone’s inner filing system.This isn’t retail. It’s an invitation-only obsession. And if you knock with purpose, that helps.889 Broadway, Union Square, ManhattanGlobus WashitsuA kimono-styling class at Globus Washitsu, near Union Square.Up a nondescript elevator near Union Square, through a quiet hallway and a final sliding door, is something few New Yorkers expect to find above Broadway: a Kyoto-style tatami room meticulously built by the investor and longtime Japanophile Stephen Globus. Think shoji screens, hinoki beams, seasonal scrolls — nothing here is an approximation. It’s the real deal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Book Review: ‘Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly,’ by Jeff Weiss

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      In a scrappy new memoir, Jeff Weiss blurs fact and fancy as he recounts his stint as a bit player in the celebrity-industrial complex.WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS: A True Story, Allegedly, by Jeff WeissIn 2023, the pop princess Britney Spears published her autobiography, “The Woman in Me.” In its pages, Spears had choice words for the paparazzi who pursued her at the heights and depths of her fame. She described them as enemy combatants, the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, sharks who sensed blood in the water. They were, she wrote, “an army of zombies” who treated her with “disregard” and “disgust.”She hated them. She feared them. Jeff Weiss, by his own account, was one of them.In the 2000s, Weiss worked as an occasional reporter for a couple of tabloids. (He was also cited for trespassing on Brad Pitt’s property, ostensibly at the bidding of People magazine.) He details these exploits — with grandiosity and rue — in “Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly.” It is not a novel, not yet a memoir. A roman à clef? Probably. Autofiction? Sure. It is also, in its most engaging moments, a bedazzled biography of Spears herself, as glimpsed across the dance floor, or through a long lens.Weiss, if you believe him, first met Spears when he sneaked into the “ … Baby One More Time” video shoot, which was held at his Venice, Calif., high school. The first glimpse of a pigtailed Spears ensorcelled him. A few years later, sprung from college and lightly adrift, Weiss found himself flung into her orbit again. Zhuzhing his résumé and shushing his qualms, Weiss persuaded a tabloid to hire him as a Hollywood party and celebrity reporter. (Context clues suggest that the tabloid was Star; in the book, Weiss calls it Nova.)This is a book that wears its antecedents on its sleeve, or perhaps low on the brow, like a Von Dutch hat. There’s new journalism here and gonzo journalism, as well as more literary stabs at the mournfulness of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the contempt of Nathanael West. Parts of the book read like a retread of “Miss Lonelyhearts,” doused in apple martinis. Other sections suggest link-rotted LiveJournal entries. In broad strokes, it is a story of a young man’s disillusionment, a West Coast “Sweet Smell of Success,” if success smelled like Victoria’s Secret body mist.These strokes are indifferently compelling. Weiss falters in building stakes or sympathy for the self he describes. A 22-year-old college grad distracted from working on his novel? Oh no! And there is a cloying quality to his repeated insistence that he is too pure, too talented to do the work of a tabloid reporter. Many of us who make a life in journalism have done as bad or worse, without ever expensing our drinks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Frederick Forsyth, Master of the Geopolitical Thriller, Dies at 86

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      He wrote best-sellers like “The Day of the Jackal” and “The Dogs of War,” often using material from his earlier life as a reporter and spy.Frederick Forsyth, who used his early experience as a British foreign correspondent and occasional intelligence operative as fodder for a series of swashbuckling, best-selling thrillers in the 1970s and ’80s, including “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” died on Monday at his home in Jordans, a village north of London. He was 86.His literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, who confirmed the death, did not specify a cause, saying only that Mr. Forsyth’s had died after a short illness.Mr. Forsyth was a master of the geopolitical nail-biter, writing novels embedded in an international demimonde populated by spies, mercenaries and political extremists. He wrote 24 books, including 14 novels, and sold more than 75 million copies.His stories often juxtapose a single individual against sprawling networks of power and money — an unnamed assassin against the French government in “The Day of the Jackal” (1971), a lone German reporter against a shadowy conspiracy to protect ex-Nazi officers in “The Odessa File” (1972).A film version of “The Day of the Jackal,” starring Edward Fox, right, and Cyril Cusack was released in 1973, just two years after the novel’s publication.George Higgins/Universal Pictures“It’s one man against a huge machine,” he told The Times of London in 2024, explaining why so many readers of “The Day of the Jackal” sided with a hit man intent on killing French President Charles de Gaulle, instead of with the authorities. “We don’t like machines, so one guy even trying to kill a human being, taking on this vast machine of government, secret intelligence service, police and so on, has appeal.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More