Entertainment
12 Books Coming in November
Carson the Magnificent By Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas Ten years after retiring from “The Tonight Show,” Carson talked with Zehme for a 2002 Esquire piece that stands as his only public discussion of life after TV superstardom. Plans for a biography …
Carson the Magnificent
By Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas
Ten years after retiring from “The Tonight Show,” Carson talked with Zehme for a 2002 Esquire piece that stands as his only public discussion of life after TV superstardom. Plans for a biography were stalled, then cut short, when Zehme, the author of books about Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman, died in 2023. Finished by his former research assistant, “Carson the Magnificent” promises to capture an entertainer who remained at once familiar and remote.
Simon & Schuster, Nov. 5
Didion and Babitz
By Lili Anolik
Following her discovery, in Eve Babitz’s Huntington Library archives, of an unsent letter addressed to Joan Didion — “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” — Anolik, a Vanity Fair journalist, probes the relationship between these two contemporaries. The writers moved in similar circles in 1960s and ’70s Los Angeles, but their connection went far deeper than Anolik had previously known.
Scribner, Nov. 12
The New India
By Rahul Bhatia
This account of India’s embrace of ethnic and religious nationalism under the rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi integrates archival sources, reportage and interviews with ordinary Indians as well as the author’s personal history to deliver a disturbing chronicle of a country where the push to modernize has been accompanied by an assault on democratic institutions, along with surging discrimination and intolerance.
Public Affairs, Nov. 12
