Create your own free news widgets.

Sarah Churchwell enjoys the biography of a great US writer who burned bright, but died too youngFlannery opens with an epigraph: 'As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me,' Flannery O'Connor wrongly predicted, because 'lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.' But as Brad Gooch shows in this skilful, gentle biography, what it lacked in titillation, O'Connor's short, poignant life made up for in intensity. Her relatively uneventful existence as a 'hermit novelist' notwithstanding, it's astonishing that it has taken half a century for an authoritative biography of this major writer, who died in 1964, to appear. O'Connor is by any measure one of the most important 20th-century American writers, arguably the greatest southern writer after William Faulkner (who said of her novel Wise Blood, 'now that's good stuff'). The poet Elizabeth Bishop said her 'writing is so damned good compared to almost anything else one reads: economical, clear,

He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but maintains that 'nobody knows anything' about movies, not least him. 'I was programmed to fail,' screenwriting legend William Goldman confesses to Joe QueenanPerhaps it's no surprise that William Goldman, the world's greatest and most famous living screenwriter, author of Marathon Man, Misery, The Princess Bride and All the President's Men, and subject of this week's South Bank Show, refers to critics as 'failures and whores'.In the late-60s, Goldman sold his first original screenplay - a little script called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - to 20th Century Fox for $400,000, a record at the time. Goldman, already a successful literary novelist who'd shown his gift for cinema by adapting Harper from a Ross McDonald book, felt the fee justified the eight years of research he'd put into the story, not to mention the script's commercial potential. But film critics, particularly those from Goldman's adopted home of new york, didn't agree. A

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) is proud to announce that A.C.T.?s 2008?09 season gala, Illuminate the Night, raised $715,000 to benefit A.C.T?s acclaimed conservatory programs. The elegant gala event, co-chaired by Carla Crane and Chandra Geiger Gordon, was attended by over 300 of San Francisco?s cultural, corporate, and philanthropic communities, as well as alumni of A.C.T.?s Master of Fine Arts Program such as Tony Award?winning actor Anika Noni Rose. The black tie event took place Sunday, April 19, 2009, at San Francisco?s Four Seasons Hotel and featured an exclusive performance by Judy Kaye, Tony Award?winning star of A.C.T.?s Sweeney Todd and Souvenir. Students from A.C.T.?s own Master of Fine Arts Program and Young Conservatory also performed in musical numbers directed by John Carrafa, the Tony Award?nominated choreographer of Urinetown, the Musical. Along with a cocktail hour and elegant dinner, Illuminate the Night featured a live auction, a paddle raise, and a specia

For someone who takes their clothes off for a living, it’s no surprise Dita Von Teese gets to create her own line of lingerie. She’s been hired by Wonderbra to recreate her unique look for the masses.And while many of us may be cutting back on life’s little luxuries in the current economic climate [...]

Film News: Studio, director to work out budget concerns -- Universal Pictures has put the brakes on 'Bioshock,' the Gore Verbinski-directed live action adaptation of the bestselling Take-Two Interactive vidgame.

This Monday, April 27th, Constantine Maroulis & Amy Spanger will be interviewed live on CBS's national morning show 'The Early Show' (Channel 2 in NYC) at around 8:30AM, as part of a big '1980's Rock N Roll' morning.

Beyonce has exercised revenge on the internet prankster who faked a recording of her singing out-of-tune - by wowing fans with a flawless live performance on US TV.

Tribesmen this week filed a $10m lawsuit for defamation over an April 2008 articleThe profiles of the two legally warring parties could not be further apart. On the one side are two poor tribesmen living in a remote part of New Guinea; on the other a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling author and arguably the world's most urbane magazine, The New Yorker.The tribesmen this week filed a $10m (£6.8m) lawsuit for defamation in a Manhattan court claiming that Jared Diamond had portrayed them wrongly as vengeful, bloodthirsty killers. The two-page complaint said they were falsely accused of 'serious criminal activity and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, including murder'.The dispute flows from the 21 April 2008 edition of the New Yorker in which Diamond wrote an article headlined 'Vengeance is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?' Diamond, a professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has made hi

The National Enquirer claims in its new issue that American Idol 8 finalists Adam Lambert and Kris Allen 'now go for long periods of time without speaking to one another' and 'are locked in a bitter feud -- over everything from their glaringly different lifestyles to their messy shared living space!' And if there's an exclamation point, it must be true.The anonymous 'insider close to the hit FOX show,' as the Enquirer identifies their 'source' (a scan of the article, which isn't on the paper's web site, comes via Towleroad) mostly blames this on culture war nonsense: 'Adam is gay and a very flamboyant guy from L.A., while Kris is a conservative married man from a small Arkansas town.' And thus they must hate each other.Adam and Kris are roommates at the mansion where the finalists live, and the most plausible part is the insider's claim that 'they'd both love to have a room of their own to recoup and prepare for their performances. The tight personal space is cramping on their styl

It's one thing to watch your favorite Broadway performers on stage, but it's another to actually become a part of their show. During the week of April 27- May 1, 2009, top-rated morning program 'Live with Regis and Kelly' will give the show's nationwide TV audience a vicarious thrill when America's favorite co-hosts jump into the roles of some of the best Broadway characters during 'On Broadway Week.'