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When the National Magazine Awards were handed out last month, I blew it. There was a winner from Los Angeles. Evan Wright, who writes from here for Rolling Stone, got the reporting category award for his dispatches from the Iraq war. The panel wrote:
"Writer-photographer Evan Wright risked his life to get this story—a rollicking, profane, brutal look at the Marines of Bravo Company, who led the charge into Iraq last year. In the course of myriad firefights, mortar shellings and ambushes, Wright won the trust of his subjects, but he remained clear-eyed, depicting the soldier’s cold-bloodedness as well as their humanity. Brilliant down to the last detail."
It gets worse. After I listed the award finalists back in March, Emmanuelle Richard posted a helpful comment that Wright was from here, and I just missed it. Anyway, he lives in West L.A. — and on June 17, LA Weekly is having a launch party for his upcoming book expanding on the Iraq pieces, Generation Kill. It's at Boardner's in Hollywood. (Wright used to write for the Weekly.)
Book shorts: David Kipen, the former Buzz and Variety editor who is currently the San Francisco Chronicle book critic (and KCRW commentator), has an essay in the June Atlantic arguing that no one makes films for American audiences anymore. He writes: "Here, alas, is the virus laying waste to modern Hollywood movies."...Also in The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh reviews Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill...Steve Oney mines amusing episodes from Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame in a review in today's New York Observer, and also picks up the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for best book of 2004 on the legal system for And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.
And from this week's Publishers Lunch, author Nichelle D. Tramble and a couple of People reporters have sold fiction works set in Hollywood:
• Nichelle D. Tramble's new novel, set in present day Los Angeles, about an assistant at a Beverly Hills talent agency who has one of the most feared bosses in the entertainment industry, whose dream of producing her own show is put in jeopardy when her boss becomes the primary suspect in the murder of her ex-husband, a powerful studio head. Sold to Ballantine/XYZ.• People Magazine reporter Kristin Harmel's HOW TO SLEEP WITH A MOVIE STAR, a modern-day Cinderella story meets "Notting Hill" in which a reporter, an ordinary woman who shops at the Gap, wakes up in bed with the world's hottest movie star. Sold to Warner, for original trade paperback.
• Journalist Irene Zutell's debut novel THEY'RE NOT YOUR FRIENDS, a gossipy, humorous Hollywood romp set in the silicone valley-girl world of celebrity journalism, based on the author's five year stint at People magazine. Sold to Three Rivers Press/Crown.