🎟️🎭🎼➪☛☞ BUY IT HERE☚☜⇦🎼🎭🎟️

You’ve heard, I’m sure, of my famous but highly elusive brother, Mischa Berlinski. He’s the author of FIELDWORK—a finalist for the National Book Award— and PEACEKEEPING. His writing has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. He got a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award. He’s the big family literary success. But he’s very shy, and until now, he has categorically refused to come on this podcast.

However, he’s written a new book. He would very much like you to pre-order it, and so would I, because pre-ordering is hugely important: If it looks as if people are excited and eager to read a book, the algorithms will start flogging it.

So, capitalizing on his desire to sell his book, I’ve managed to persuade him to introduce himself to you and tell you a bit about MONA ACTS OUT—a novel that just happens to take place over the course of a single Thanksgiving Day.

We’d be ever so grateful if you were to pre-order it now. I promise you won’t regret it. It really is so good.

I’ll add some extra motivation too: If you pre-order a copy today, I’ll comp you an extra month here at CG.

Here’s the cover blurb:

Both beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, MONA ACTS OUT is a novel about acting and telling the truth; about how we play roles to get through our days; and how the great roles teach us how to live.

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of a household of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband, who has not forgotten what happened last night; and in just a few weeks she is supposed to step into the rehearsal room as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It’s the hardest role in theatre—and the first role Mona has ever attempted without her sister, who died just over a year ago, by her side. When her father-in-law starts fighting with her niece about Donald Trump, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!”) to find the only person she doesn’t have to act for: her estranged longtime mentor, Milton Katz, who may or may not be dying and who was recently forced out of the legendary theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s trek turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face to face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has loved and still loves.

A brilliant, highly-anticipated return of a writer of almost magical descriptive and imaginative powers.

The reviews so far have been fabulous:

Kirkus (Starred review):

Berlinski follows acclaimed novels set in Thailand (Fieldwork, 2007) and Haiti (Peacekeeping, 2016) with a New York–based comedy of of manners and morals featuring a brilliantly imagined female protagonist, Mona Zahid, one of the stars of a Shakespearean theater troupe based in the East Village. Until recently, the company was led by legendary director Milton Katz, but an article in The New York Times, filled with accusations of misconduct from a slew of actresses, led to his disgrace. Mon herself “an out-and-out, unabashed Miltophile,” was not among the accusers. We meet her as she awakens in her Morningside Heights apartment on Thanksgiving Day to a full house—in addition to her surgeon husband, teenage son, and canine companion Barney, her in-laws and her college student niece, Rachel, are milling about. Absent is Rachel’s mother—Mona’s sister, Zahra—who died less than a year earlier, leaving Mona a stash of 150 pain pills of which there are now only six. Mona starts her day by taking two. Not long after, she hears the assembled family members begin to argue about Milton Ka

Episode ID: 1000678571243

GUID: substack:post:152236038

Release Date: 29/11/2024, 03:39:18