Lanny Jones discusses his recently published book "Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers" with Joyce Carol Oates. Book signing to follow.
From the writer and editor who coined the term “baby boomer” comes "Celebrity Nation," an exploration of how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of “likes” and shares — and what this change means for American culture. He is joined in conversation by Joyce Carol Oates, a literary celebrity who by contrast is famous for her craft.
Landon Jones—who spent decades in “celebrityland” only to emerge, like Alice, blinking in the sunlight—brings a personal and first-person perspective on fame and its dark underbelly, complicated even further by the arrival of the internet and social media.
Jones draws on his experience as the former managing editor of People magazine to bolster his account with profiles of celebrities he knew personally, ranging from Malcolm X to Princess Diana, as well as observations about contemporary social media stars like Kim Kardashian and computer-generated macro-influencer Miquela, a self-proclaimed “19-year-old Robot living in LA.” In analyzing the stories of over 75 celebrities, spanning decades and industries, Jones shows how celebrity has been wielded as a weapon of mass distraction to spawn narcissism, harm, and loneliness.
About the speakers:
Landon Y. (Lanny) Jones is the former managing editor of People and Money magazines and the author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West. Jones also edited a selection of the expedition journals, The Essential Lewis and Clark. In 1980, he published Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, which coined the phrase “baby-boomer” and was a finalist for the American Book Award in Nonfiction. In 2015, he received the Henry R. Luce Award for Lifetime Achievement from Time Inc.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award, among many honors. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and The Falls. Her most recent novels are Babysitter and 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister. She is Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and teaches at NYU.
This event is co-presented by Labyrinth Books and the library.
