Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Christopher Beha

A hilarious and biting satire of fame from the acclaimed author of What Happened to Sophie Wilder
A cutting send-up of our cultural obsession with celebrity—and a deliciously witty, ultimately tender novel about the absurdity of fame and the complexity of love.

Handsome Eddie Hartley was once a golden boy poised for the kind of success promised by good looks and modicum of talent. Now thirty-three, he has abandoned his dream of an acting career and accepted the reality of life as a drama teacher at a boys' prep school he once attended. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it's one disappointment too many.

Weighted down with debt, Susan's mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. In an era when any publicity is good publicity, Eddie imagines that the tape won't cause any harm—a mistake that will have disastrous consequences and propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved.

A hilariously biting and incisive take-down of our culture's monstrous obsession with fame, ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTS is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man's belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.

Christopher Beha is a deputy editor at Harper's magazine. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, The Believer, Bookforum and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder and the memoir The Whole Five Feet.
Available products
Book

Published 2014-07-01 by Ecco Press

Comments

Utterly hilarious a wild and funny ride. - Jami Attenberg

A smart, biting exploration of the tensions between reality and performance, pretending and believing, audience and self, Arts & Entertainments is also a thoughtful meditation on the fundamental human need to believe that somebody out there is watching.

A former actor's sex tape rocks his world. Arts & Entertainments, by Christopher Beha, is a must.

I tore through ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTS in a single evening, riveted by Beha's satiric indictment of an appallingly recognizable celebrity culture. - Rebecca Mead

A moving, discomfiting and at times painful satire on our reality-TV culture that had me cackling in recognition and cowering in shame. - Adam Ross

In this novel, being a star is like being trapped in a Kafka story. As Beha pushes Hartley through the bizarre mechanics of fame, he brings in everything from religion to social media. It's a funny, sharp study of celebrity and all the strings that come with it. A-

The ingenious way he plots to get back into his wife's good graces provides lots of laughs in this very clever takedown of celebrity culture. Beha, deputy editor at Harper's magazine, also gives his hapless hero plenty of heart in a novel that is both entertaining and thought provoking.

A witty, precise rendering of how, in the age of non-stop multiplatform opportunities for self-obsession, we collude in our own commodification. - Dana Spiotta

Arts & Entertainments is indeed entertaining, but it's also a thoughtful reflection on how we shape our own stories. (starred review)

A smart, wicked-fast satire. - Jess Walter

Beha's story could be (and is) a light satirical romp across our cultural lowlands, but it is also a meditation on the inchoate impulses that lead people to expose themselves, often literally, to the world.