LATEST BOOKSHELVES
No surprise that a man who has memorized more than 50 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and recites them regularly to keep his mind sharp, would include a book of those sonnets on his desert island. That’s not the only book that illuminates F. Murray Abraham’s love of the classics. There’s also Dickens, Tolstoy, and Proust–and one book without which no other books would exist: the dictionary. The veteran actor, now 83, has been slaying audiences on Broadway and on screen for over five decades, winning an Oscar for his role as Salieri in Miloš Forman’s 1984 film, Amadeus. Many roles have followed, but it was his memorable performance in the second season of Mike White’s water-cooler hit, White Lotus, that brought him a new generation of fans–assuming, that is, that they hadn’t already discovered him as the Egyptian god Khonshu in the Marvel fantasy series, Moon Knight. But while television has brought him a global following, it is theater that retains his heart. He’s been in at least 70 shows on, off, and off off Broadway, including as Roy Cohn in Angels in America; Pozzo in Mike Nichol’s production of Waiting for Godot; and playing opposite Helen Mirren in A Month in the Country. He says, “I think we tend to load these lists with titles that puff us up, because after all it's only ten books, not much when you consider that’s what Joyce Carol Oates reads in a couple days. There are too many I’ve left off by Mailer, Oates, Bradbury, Dostoevsky, Coetzee, Sappho, etc etc. But a desert island can’t be all heavy literature; there should be some fun books too, as well as books on living in the wild; how about Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson?”
Below are F.Murray Abraham's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.
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LATEST BOOKSHELVES
Sera Gamble is the screenwriter and showrunner for the hit Hetflix series You, based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, in which the romantic hero is not just a pretty face - he’s a serial killer as well. You is not the first book that Gamble has turned into darkly entertaining television. She also created The Magicians for the SyFy Channel, based on the best-selling novel by Lev Grossman. And she was a showrunner on Supernatural, a haunting fantasy series which ran for 15 seasons. She has said, “I’m a horror writer in my heart, in that I always like to ask myself what scares me, and what scares us universally when I’m approaching a story. To me there’s just about nothing scarier than the truth that we can never really know another person.” Below are Sera Gamble's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.
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LATEST BOOKSHELVES
It took William Boyd three failed attempts at writing a novel before he hit gold with A Good Man in Africa, which won him both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award. That was in 1981, and Boyd hasn’t stopped to draw breath since. This year he has published both the paperback version of his 16th novel, Trio, and the hardback of his 17th novel, The Romantic, another sweeping panorama of one man's life, this time set against the tumultuous years of the 19th century. Boyd has also published four collections of short stories and written 20 screen plays Among his other achievements is bringing James Bond back to life, in the novel Solo–in which the martini-swigging spy undertakes a mission to the fictionalized West African country of Zanzarim - a stand in for the Nigeria in which Boyd spent his youth. Below are William Boyd's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.
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LATEST BOOKSHELVES
“I’m very nervous about doing this,” says Coel with admirable candor. “My memory is really bad, to the point that I forgot how bad my memory was.” She does, however, recall being spurred to spend a summer reading books by her local library which gave a medal to anyone who reached a goal of reading ten books. Coel, the child of an immigrant Ghanaian mother, won that library medal after devouring Marieke Nijkamp’s series of graphic novels for kids, Goosebumps. “I wasn’t really into things like sports, I didn’t dance, so reading really occupied me that summer and took my brain somewhere else, for which I’m forever grateful.” The actress, screenwriter, and director, who found acclaim in the UK with her series, Chewing Gum, and then as the lead in Black Earth Rising, Hugo Blick’s intense political thriller for Netflix, is a keen writer herself: she went through 191 drafts of her autobiographical HBO-BBC series, I May Destroy You, before she felt ready to release it into the world. The series won her a British Academy Award, and she is nominated for four Emmys this year, including for actress, writer, and director. If that was not enough, she has just published her first book, Misfits, based on a wry, moving, often witty lecture she was invited to give at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in 2018 (you can watch it online here) in which she talked about the racism she’d encountered in drama school and the wider entertainment industry. Her book expands on and deepens the themes of that lecture.
Below, are Michaela Coel's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.
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LATEST BOOKSHELVES
When HBO, desperate to feed the pandemic TV appetite, asked Mike White if he wanted to create a new TV show, the veteran actor, writer, and director didn’t need to be asked twice. “The filtration system of getting something on the air is aggravating and time-consuming,” he told The New Yorker recently. “I thought, If they go with this, it’ll be like a boulder they can’t stop. I can do exactly what I want to do.” The “this” was his runaway hit, The White Lotus, a veritable Trojan Horse--a spiky critique of class and privilege dressed up as a murder mystery. A second season was greenlit before the first season--six episodes each written and directed by White--concluded with what was among the most satisfying TV finales in recent memory. White has one of Hollywood’s most eclectic resumes, running the gamut from the comedy musical, School of Rock, to the lauded HBO series, Enlightened, starring Laura Dern, to, well, The Emoji Movie, but his not-so-secret passion is competing on reality TV. He has been a contestant on The Amazing Race, twice, and on Survivor. “As a writer of drama, I aspire to do what reality television already does,” he told The New Yorker, “To create characters that are surprising and dimensional and do weird shit and capture your attention.” When he’s not writing, directing, acting, or competing, White is a reader, as this list of books reflects. “These may not be my 10 favorite books, that’s impossible,” he writes. “But these come to mind and are ones I’m always recommending.”
Below are Mike Whites's books, available to purchase individually or as a set. Photo: Courtesy of Jason Yokobosky
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