Welcome to the second installment of this year’s awards season reading list. Here you’ll find bespoke recommendations tailored to your favorite movie of last year. After last week’s Marty Supreme list, I bring you another pairing from mid-century New York. But the books below are for fans of Richard Linklater’s chatty speculative history, Blue Moon.
Following the hard-headed and hard-drinking composer Lorenz Hart over a disappointing night at Sardi’s—where his partner Richard Rogers is being feted for his breakout, Oklahoma!—Blue Moon‘s pleasures are at once cerebral and gossipy. These books offer both.
Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure
Editor Emily Temple recently noted this novel in our list of most anticipated 2025 books. But I’d like to call Blue Moon fans to special attention. This witty, urbane gem from actor/author Beryl Bainbridge depicts a Liverpudlian theatre company that gets embroiled in scandal. And Stella, the plucky assistant stage manager/hero, shares some DNA with Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth Weiland—in that both women are lightly obsessed with a theater god.
A brand new edition is forthcoming this March from McNally Editions, with an introduction by none other than Yiyun Li. If you love backstage intrigue as much as Lorenz Hart, this one’s definitely for you.
E.B. White, Essays
Okay, okay. This is possibly a cheat, considering the fact that Mr. White himself makes an extended cameo in Linklater’s latest. But I for one was glad for the reminder to revisit some of the best essays ever put to mid-century paper.
A bard of the farm, the planet, and the city, White likes to drift between pithy observation and philosophy. (Just like Mr. Hart!) His romantic essays capture the spirit of a certain Manhattan. In this collection’s lodestar piece, “Here is New York,” White describes meeting actors—like Fred Stone, of The Wizard of Oz—and various other “diehards and authentic characters” in and around a town that bestows both “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” A bluer moon there’s hardly been.
Happy reading! (And Hawke-heads, don’t be discouraged by the Golden Globes. We’re still in the running.)
