Amy Sohn's Blog

https://www.thewoolfer.com/feeds/andrew-amy?req_type=html&k=791fd65f

So The Actress is coming out July 1. I am super stoked and nervous and doing a lot of walking lunges. To help me celebrate, everyone in New York City and all of their friends are invited to my Bookcourt launch, on the pub date, July 1.

I had 200 people come to Barnes & Noble Astor Place in 1999 when I wrote Run Catch Kiss. One of these people was my father, who came incognito in dark wraparound sunglasses and stood in the front row – after I suggested he not attend. His dark glasses caused my high school friends to approach him and say, “Mr. Sohn, good to see you. Why are you wearing dark glasses?” Now it’s 15 years later and BN Astor Place is gone but wouldn’t it be great if that many people came to Bookcourt and proved that outdoor drinking and/or watching TV on the computer in is not as much fun as hearing a reading of a gripping, Gothic, feminist, Zeigesty, juicy novel of marriage?

We’ll have food and libations.

Here’s the link with all the info.

And here is a cute pic of Bookcourt.



If you can’t make this one, come hear me in conversation with Choire Sicha, editor of The Awl author of Very Recent History, and former editorial director of Gawker, at Word in Greenpoint, on July 15 at 7 PM. RSVP here.

If you live in the Boston area, please come hear me read at Newtonville Books on July 17 with Julie Wu, author of The Third Son.

Last Saturday I covered the wedding of Derrence Washington and Gawker founder and publisher Nick Denton for the “Vows” column in The New York Times. I was happy with the result.

On July 1, 2014, my new novel, The Actress, will be published. I could not be more excited. The idea came for me about two and a half years ago and I have been hard at work on it ever since. It is not set in Brooklyn – but in Berlin, Utah, Venice, Hancock Park, and OK, a tiny bit in Brooklyn. My first reading will be at Bookcourt on July 1. Some amazing authors who I admire have been kind enough to give praise to the novel:

“Amy Sohn’s unputdownable The Actress is like Henry James crossbred with the very best of US Weekly. An addictive saga of love, lust, fame, and friendship centered on a fascinating question: Are we who we pretend to be?”

- Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia and How This Night is Different

“Amy Sohn turns her razor-sharp eye on stardom in this sexy and engaging novel. The Actress delves deep into the nature of love and marriage, and offers a behind-the-scenes studio tour of Hollywood to boot.”

- Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers

“Amy Sohn peels back the tabloid curtain and portrays, in granular detail, the emotional and vocational machinations of a made-in-Hollywood marriage. The Actress is a riveting and frothy novel.”

- Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“The Actress is an intelligent and humane novel that manages to civilize Hollywood while honoring its often overlooked complexities and still leaving its wicked vitality intact.”

- Elizabeth Kelly, author of Apologize, Apologize! and The Last Summer of the Camperdowns

“In the story of Maddy Freed, indie actress gone Hollywood A-list, Amy Sohn delivers at once a serious Bildungsroman and a surreptitious pleasure. The Actress is juicy and addictive, a Jamesian Page Six of a novel.”

- Elizabeth Gaffney, author of When the World Was Young

“Utterly engrossing from first page to last, The Actress is the best kind of page-turner. Beautifully written, acutely observed, and just plain delicious. I couldn’t put it down.”

- Dani Shapiro

Pre-order the book from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indiebound, or your local bookseller.

Here is the book description:

A big, lively breakout novel from bestselling author Amy Sohn, in which a talented young actress falls in love with Hollywood’s biggest star—ignoring the rumors that he’s gay—only to realize that she may just have been cast in the role of a lifetime.

All Maddy Freed has ever wanted is to act. When the indie film she made with her director boyfriend, Dan, wins her a special prize at the Mile’s End Film Festival, she’s thrilled, though she has no idea how dramatically it will come to change her life. But Maddy’s success catches the attention of Bridget Ostrow, a legendary talent manager whose biggest client is Hollywood heartthrob Steven Weller. Before Maddy knows it, her career is roaring onto the express track.

Bridget secures Maddy an audition for an Oscar-worthy role opposite Steven, and soon the two actors are thrown together in the midst of Europe’s Old World charm. Rumors about Steven’s sexual orientation have circulated for years, but it doesn’t take long for the professional relationship to grow personal, or for Maddy to turn her back on her old friends and trade New York for L.A. The new couple’s whirlwind wedding does nothing to stop the rumors, however, and cracks start appearing in their fairytale romance. As Maddy stands by the man she believes is the love of her life, she begins to question just how much she knows about her leading role…as Steven’s wife.

Over the years many people have written to ask if I would put out a collection of my New York Press column, “Female Trouble,” which ran from 1996 to 1999. I have no plans to do so but I’ve done the next best thing, which is given all of the columns to Byliner.

If you read them in chronological order it’s like a mini-novel, taking you through the Novel Lover years, the Young Director months, and all the one-nighters in between, including Radical Hottie, Social Satirist, Guy Nouveau, Indie Rocker, Darius Rucker, Indie Auteur, Comic Cynic, Mr. Director, Tom of “The Booby Trap” and of course, Paul. You can also read such classics as “The Drools,” my satire of The Rules, “The Line of Seriousness,” about the pitfalls of saying “I love you” first, and “Stench of a Woman,” about what happened after I farted in bed with a new boyfriend.

The content is not free, you have to sign up to Byliner Premium, but it’s cheap and with it you get to read Bissinger and Krakauer and Tan, not just my “Female Trouble” columns.

To get a sampling of all my content on Byliner including “Female Trouble,” go here:

To go to the home page of Byliner and explore, go here:

More soon,

AMY

Had a great time at John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet of Wonders 3/14 at City Winery, in company of Fred Armisen, Dan Zanes, Graham Parker, Hospitality, and Peter Carey. Wes wrote a limerick about me, as he does all of his performers:

There once was a writer called Sohn

Admired for her humourous tone

Don’t look to her books

For detectives and crooks

But a grope in Park Slope’s not unknown.

The show will air on NPR at some point in the next year, I’ll update here.

More soon about my FIFTH novel in this space, and Motherland will be out in paperback July 2nd.

Going on NPR’s “All Things Considered” tomorrow, Saturday August 26. Please check your listings to see when it’s on!!

In less dramatically exciting news, I got back from my MOTHERLAND mini-book tour about a week ago and wanted to share some photos. When I found out I had to get from Boston to Sag Harbor to Mattituck I decided to do most of it by ferry. Why do land when I could do water? Thanks to the people who came out in those fine cities to see me, especially in Mattituck, NY, where we had a lively discussion and one woman told me, “I live in a Long Island suburb. Come see my hell.”

Here are some pics with captions.

Cross Sound Ferry New London-Orient

S92 Suffolk County bus Orient-Greenport

Orient, NY

Peconic Jitney from Greenport-Sag Harbor

Sag Harbor

With Sag Harbor Trustee R. Stein in the American Hotel. I'm sporting ferry hair.

Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times weighed in on MOTHERLAND in this week’s “Big City” column. I am extremely grateful to be covered on the front page of the Metropolitan section and am a faithful reader of Ginia’s column. I read this one three times, trying to glean her thesis. She seemed conflicted. I think her point was: “In these books people have adultery but only with neighbors. That is new and that is depressing.” I would like to say that the people in my novel who have affairs do it with very exciting people who are not their neighbors. One does it with ex-neighbor who has moved to Manhattan.

I would also like to say that even if people do sleep with their neighbors, that is not a new thing. People have been sleeping with their neighbors for a very long time. I think there is a scene about this in Mel Brooks’ History of the World. I think Rick Moody also wrote about it more recently.

P.S. Can anyone name the location of the photograph? I can and it ain’t the Slo.

The Brooklyn Writers Space LitCrawl Reading

Saturday, May 19, 2012

6 PM.

Bookcourt Bookstore, 163 Court Street near Dean St.

with:

Terence Degnan, Jim Hanas, Heidi Schreck, Amy Sohn

Was everything really OK for Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court when the no smoking sign dinged off? Come find out what members of the Brooklyn Writers Space think happened after the ending of Say Anything.

New York’s Lit Crawl is a madcap concept first created by San Francisco’s Litquake literary festival back in 2004. It’s a bar crawl, with literature! The inaugural Lit Crawl NYC took place in September 2008 and has grown into a lively, wildly popular annual event. Lit Crawl Brooklyn is sponsored by Brooklyn Writer’s Space; Pratt; Sixpoint Brewery; Out of Print Clothing; Brooklyn Historic Society; PEN America

http://litcrawl.org/nyc

In thinking about the locations for my new novel MOTHERLAND (out August 14), I remembered that someone made a map of the locations for the prequel to Motherland, Prospect Park West. On Google Maps you can do custom maps, which means of fictitious people living in fictitious books. For Motherland I am hoping someone can build an iPhone app with locations from both books, so if you are visiting Brooklyn you can go to the real/fake places. For one of my real favorite places in the neighborhood, check out this video I did for WSJ.com.

If you’re interested in the people, places, and things mentioned in works of fiction you’ll enjoy Small Demons, which has a fantastic page for Prospect Park West. You have to join to see it or any others but it’s free.