Annalena McAfee. (2012). The Spoiler. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Annalena McAfee. 2012. The Spoiler. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Annalena McAfee, The Spoiler. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Annalena McAfee. The Spoiler. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

OverDrive Product Record

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: McAfee, Annalena
   • bioText: ANNALENA MCAFEE was born in London and was educated at Essex University. McAfee has edited a collection of literary profiles, Lives and Works, and is the author of eight children's books. She has been a judge of the Orange Prize for Fiction, the South Bank Show Awards, and the Ben Pimlott Prize for political writing. She lives in London with her husband, the writer Ian McEwan.
   • name: Annalena McAfee

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2012-04-10T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Spoiler

fullDescription

A dark hyper-comedy set in London in the late 1990s during the last gasp of the newspaper wars just before the dot-com tidal wave—about two female journalists at opposite ends of their life and work who become locked in a fierce tango of wills and whose lives are forever changed by their (not-so-) brief (head-on) encounter.
At the novel's center—a legendary prize-winning war correspondent (called in her day "The Newsroom Dietrich" because of her luminescent beauty) now in her eighties, at the end of her career, who, over the decades, as the intrepid golden girl of the press, has been on the front lines or in the foxholes of every major theater of war of the twentieth century (Madrid; Normandy; Buchenwald; Berlin; Algiers; Korea; Vietnam). She is recognized everywhere (she finds fame mortifying these days); lionized for her fearless, politically informed, objective reporting; and now, though fragile and in an accelerating decline, her goddess-like beauty long gone, her style of writing—unbiased reportage—obsolete in the age of New Journalism, is rediscovered with the reissue of her frontline journalism, and the about-to-be-published collection of her Pulitzer Prize-winning dispatches. The other, a young up-and-not-so-coming reporter in her twenties; a degree in media studies, a freelance editor who compiles A-lists (Ten Best / Ten Worst; What's In / What's Out) for a down-market magazine of a newspaper specializing in celebrity gossip, unexpectedly sent to write a feature on the venerated "doyenne of British journalists"—to get the dirt on her glittering Hollywood days, her many affairs and three marriages...What ensues is a high-stakes, high-risk battle of wit and wills as lives are shaken, secrets unearthed, and headlines blast (unconfirmed) "truths," with one newspaper—the spoiler—playing off against another in a ruthless, desperate grab for sensation and circulation.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Alison McCulloch, The New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "McAfee skewers the Fourth Estate with an insider's insight, cutting wit and razor-sharp writing."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Examiner.com
   • content: "Sparkles with tabloid bravura . . . a dark hyper-comedy."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
   • content: "Spirited . . . [McAfee] writes with poise and polish, using her reportorial eye to create a fictional world that feels like a fun-house mirror of journalism from the late '90s . . . [that] could not be more timely. . . . McAfee manages to fuse satire and observation together in a potent brew. In doing so, she creates a blackly comic, Waugh-esque portrait of a newspaper . . . peopled with hacks, has-beens, poseurs and some genuine reporters, rabidly ambitious youngsters and weary old-timers, pretentious literary types and gutter-minded twits."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal
   • content: "McAfee . . . highlights the slide of media reporting from serious to scandalous as she crafts a story that catches journalism on the cusp of the electronic age."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "McAfee's assured grasp of the journalistic milieu . . . skillfully pillories the journalists' anxieties about the coming 'digital dystopia.'"
6. • premium: False
   • source: Shelf Awareness
   • content: "Enjoyable to read . . . a larkish spirit of farce [and] wicked fun . . . dances the story along."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "An acid satire of London newspaperdom . . . spiky, vivid, and almost pathologically clever."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus (starred review)
   • content: "A sharp, intelligent novel about 'old' journalism, 'new' journalism and the moral gap between the two . . . McAfee writes with sparkling intelligence and raises serious issues about the relationship between reporting and truth."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Christopher Buckley
   • content: "A dark, sparkly gem of a book: smart, knowing, funny, tragic: Miss Havisham meets Sex and the City. I don't know how Annalena McAfee pulled off such a balancing act, but I very much hope she goes on writing novels of this quality. A stunner."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Alex Clark, The Guardian

    • content: "A witty and entertaining debut about two very different worlds of journalism."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 15, 2012
      A sharp, intelligent novel about "old" journalism, "new" journalism and the moral gap between the two. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Honor Tait is 80 years old, and some of her vintage pieces of reporting are being re-released in book form. She has had a distinguished career and won the Pulitzer for her reporting from Buchenwald in April of 1945. But 1997, the year in which the novel is set, discloses a different type of reporting when Tamara Sim is asked to do an interview of the crusty, reclusive and highly intelligent older woman for S*nday, a journal whose clientele is more interested in scandal than in truth or integrity. Tait has indeed had something of a lurid life, one that would be sure to titillate S*nday readers, for she's had three husbands, countless lovers and is rumored--even at the age of 80--to pay for sex with younger men. Tamara's initial interview goes badly because she feels Tait's contempt for what she's doing, but Tamara keeps pursuing the story, for she wants to dig deeper into the scandalous doings Tait has told her about--a love affair with Bing Crosby, for example, cocaine use and wild Hollywood parties. Tamara hopes her reporting will make her reputation and elevate her status from her previous position on Psst! magazine, but it becomes clear that Tait has been stringing Tamara along until truth has gotten swallowed in speculation. And although Tait has not published her journalistic writing for decades, she's still working on one more memory from her Buchenwald experience that she's repressed for over 50 years. McAfee writes with sparkling intelligence and raises serious issues about the relationship between reporting and truth.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

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A dark hyper-comedy set in London in the late 1990s during the last gasp of the newspaper wars just before the dot-com tidal wave—about two female journalists at opposite ends of their life and work who become locked in a fierce tango of wills and whose lives are forever changed by their (not-so-) brief (head-on) encounter.
At the novel's center—a legendary prize-winning war correspondent (called in her day "The Newsroom Dietrich" because of her luminescent beauty) now in her eighties, at the end of her career, who, over the decades, as the intrepid golden girl of the press, has been on the front lines or in the foxholes of every major theater of war of the twentieth century (Madrid; Normandy; Buchenwald; Berlin; Algiers; Korea; Vietnam). She is recognized everywhere (she finds fame mortifying these days); lionized for her fearless, politically informed, objective reporting; and now, though fragile and in an accelerating decline, her goddess-like beauty long gone, her style of...

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