Simon Baker
Grow Up
The title of this collection of short stories nods to The Last Tycoon (1941), F Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished, posthumously published novel. Like Fitzgerald, Jay McInerney has always written about the tragic allure of glamour and wealth, and the terrible acts that people are capable of when they see something they want. This volume is filled with writers, producers and bankers (many of whom have escaped to New York from provincial backgrounds) existing on a diet of parties, drugs and illicit trysts, and in each tale someone is causing pain to someone close.
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'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2