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Bruno Maddox

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Bruno P. Maddox
File:Brunoathome.jpg
Born (1969-11-15) November 15, 1969 (age 54)[1][2]
London, UK
OccupationNovelist
Journalist
Editor-in-chief
NationalityBritish
RelativesJohn Maddox, father
Brenda Maddox, mother[3]
Bronwen Maddox, sister

Bruno Maddox (born November 15 1969) is a British literary novelist and journalist who is best known for his critically lauded novel My Little Blue Dress (2001) and for his satirical magazine essays.

After graduating from Harvard University in 1992, Maddox began his career reviewing books for The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World. In early 1996, he was appointed to an editorship at Spy magazine and within a few months he was promoted to editor-in-chief, a position he held until the magazine shut down in 1998. Maddox wrote My Little Blue Dress between 1999 and 2001. Since its publication, he has focused on writing satirical essays for magazines such as GEAR and Travel + Leisure; he also contributes a monthly humor column to Discover magazine called "Blinded by Science", drawing on his early exposure to science and technology. Maddox is likewise a contributing editor to the American edition of The Week magazine.[4]

Early years

Maddox was born in London in 1969 to former Nature editor Sir John Maddox, a writer on science and nature, and Brenda Maddox, a biographer of Rosalind Franklin, W.B. Yeats, Nora Barnacle and several others.[5][6][7] He has one sister, Bronwen, who became a journalist and is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times as of 2008.[2][8]

Despite his family's background in science, Maddox was interested in the humanities while he attended Westminster School, an independent boys' school in London. Maddox went on to study English literature at Harvard University and graduated in 1992.[9] He published his first and only article in the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson during his senior year.[10] He won the undergraduate Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for his senior thesis "on the use of adjectives in restaurant menus" titled Maltese: A Gastrosophic Theory of Reading.[11][2] After graduation Maddox moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Moscow—where he worked for three weeks as the English-language editor of a Russian magazine—and then to New York City, where he spent two years working odd jobs, including hand-delivering celebrity invitations to local parties.[12]

Maddox's freelance writing career began in 1994, when he became a book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, where he developed a reputation for writing scathing reviews that would later help him land a job as an editor at SPY magazine.[13][14][15] Maddox described his book reviewing style as "pretty vicious", and quipped that he "was a frustrated, twenty-something guy, sitting in his bedroom venting existential rage on these nasty academics".[13] His last book review for The Washington Post was in late 1996; however, he continued reviewing for The New York Times up until 1998, contributing only a couple of reviews thereafter.[16][17]

At the beginning of the dot-com boom, Maddox found full-time work at an information technology company, where he worked for a year and a half.[12]

Editorship of Spy magazine

In mid-1996, Maddox was hired as a senior editor at Spy magazine, a satirical monthly, in New York City.[13] Spy had ceased publication in 1994 but was quickly resuscitated under new ownership by Sussex Publishers Inc., which reduced the magazine's frequency from ten to six issues a year.[18] At Spy, Maddox was assisted by deputy editor Adam Lehner, a satirist.[19] In December 1996, Maddox was promoted to editor-in-chief;[13] his editorial team included Jared Paul Stern and, beginning in late 1997, future screenwriter William Monahan.[20][21]

Maddox wanted to turn Spy into a national magazine rather than build on its legacy of covering stories that centered on New York. According to Maddox, two factors motivated the shift of target market. The magazine's past objects of satire, the "cheesy villains who anointed themselves as targets" in the 1980s, were no longer on the national stage. Meanwhile, the "sins of the '90s [were] those of a private, quiet cultivation of a sense of purity", and were harder to expose or ridicule.[19]

In early 1998, Sussex Publishers increased Spy's frequency from six to nine issues a year in an effort to boost readership and ad pages. Spy's paid circulation continued to drop during Maddox's tenure, and in March 1998, the magazine once again ceased publication. Sussex's President and CEO John Colman concluded that "[despite the] great work by Bruno and his team, there just wasn't the [advertiser and consumer] acceptance that we need to make it financially viable".[18] Maddox conceded that "a satirical magazine in New York in the late Nineties really had no function", because "everyone was being very modest and coy".[5]

My Little Blue Dress

My Little Blue Dress
File:My Little Blue Dress front cover.JPG
AuthorBruno Maddox
LanguageEnglish
GenreLiterary fiction
PublisherViking Press
Publication date
2001
Publication placeUnited States
Pages256
ISBNISBN 978-0670884834 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

In 1999, Maddox sold the advance rights to his first novel, My Little Blue Dress, to a German publisher based on a five-page fax proposal he sent on the advice of his literary agent John Brockman.[12] Within a week Brockman managed to sell the rights to the novel to publishers in an additional eight countries on the strength of the proposal alone.[22] (Maddox had not yet written even an initial manuscript.)

It was a pretty terrifying experience, suddenly having a legal obligation to write an extremely difficult post-modern novel having never written anything before and also, stupidly, I told him I could do it in six months, which was just a conversational thing until it turned up in black and white in my contract. The six months came and went and my reputation in publishing at the moment is a reflection of the two and a half years I spent writing it longer than I should have done. The Dutch cancelled when the Millennium came and went, they decided it was a millennial book, but weirdly they would have accepted it in November of 1999, for a few days of millennial reading, they failed to see that it is obviously a twenty-first century book.

— Bruno Maddox, on the publishing of his first novel.[12]

My Little Blue Dress was published in 2001 by Viking Press, a Penguin Group imprint. The novel begins as a memoir of a hundred-year-old woman, but several chapters later reveals itself to be a spoof of the genre. The protagonist is a fictional Bruno Maddox who is desperately attempting to create a forgery of an old woman's memoir in a single night.[23] Several book reviewers avoided spoiling the novel's satire but others gave away its premise, reasoning that the publisher "reveal[s] all on the book jacket anyway".[24][25] The novel's intrigue lies in the mysterious reason compelling the fictional Maddox to forge a memoir.[25]

Critics applauded My Little Blue Dress but also expressed some reservations. For example, Salon.com's Maria Russo cautioned that the novel "is one of those 'don't try this at home' literary experiments that could easily have turned into an unreadable, pretentious disaster", but concluded that Maddox "pulls it off with a kind of fearless pizzazz".[25] The New York Times' Emily Barton conceded that "for all its blunders", Maddox delivers "a winsome and vastly entertaining novel".[26]

In an interview, Maddox praised Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, stating that he drew inspiration from protagonist Patrick Bateman's long-winded monologues about Phil Collins, restaurants, clothes, and how to remove blood from his carpets.[5]

In 2001, Maddox promoted his first novel on a joint book tour billed as the "Minor Novelists Tour" with his friend William Monahan, another former SPY editor, but it was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks. Monahan's Light House: A Trifle was also published by a Penguin imprint.[27][28] Several years later, Maddox gave some indication that he was working on a film adaptation of My Little Blue Dress,[29] but it is unknown whether Maddox completed the script.[30]

Recent essays

After the publication of My Little Blue Dress in 2001, Maddox was reportedly working on a second novel set in California, where "everyone's aspirational and deluded" and the "people are quite happy being waiters and dreaming of stardom".[31] As of 2007, however, no manuscript has been forthcoming.[32]

I don't like to think in terms of careers, I want to move from project to project … I think like anything, it's good to keep changing. I just want to live with integrity.

— Bruno Maddox, on his lack of a career path.[12]

Since 2001, Maddox has written numerous articles for popular magazines, such as the now-defunct GEAR.[33][34][35] Published one year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, his essay "Before It Was Real" describes the callousness of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center through the experience of playing a flight simulator game.[36] Another example of Maddox's work is his 2003 profile of Karl Wenclas, leader of the Underground Literary Alliance, titled "The Angriest Book Club in America" and published in the fashion magazine BlackBook.[37] Wenclas later derided Maddox for distorting the Underground Literary Alliance in his BlackBook essay and summed up the article as "riddled with falsehoods".[38]

In late 2003, Maddox began to contribute articles regularly to Travel + Leisure. His first article in the magazine was called "The Concorde, R.I.P.", which chronicled his flight aboard the supersonic Concorde airplane before it was decommissioned; it was later included in The Best Travel Writing 2005, the second volume of the annual Travelers’ Tales series.[39][40] In 2004 Maddox began working as a contributing editor for the American edition of The Week magazine and as of 2007 continues to contribute weekly to the print issue, handling sections including "Main Stories", "Talking Points", and "Only in America".[4] He also reviewed several books for The New York Post in 2004 and 2005.[29][41]

In 2006, Maddox began contributing a regular humor column called "Blinded by Science" to Discover magazine. His writing draws upon his childhood exposure to science; due to his father's career, his family was immersed in science and he was regularly exposed to scientists at social events.[6] Maddox's first year's columns earned him a nod as a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Awards' "Columns and Commentary" category.[42]

Maddox's Discover columns are often criticized; his essays "Stuck in Creationism" and "Fictional Reality", in particular, have been controversial. In 2007, Maddox attended the newly opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky and in his essay "Stuck in Creationism" described the Creationists as "fond of science" despite their need to contort "fresh claims from the world of mainstream science" so that they can "fit the framework of creationist belief or [be] discounted with some sort of scientific-sounding explanation".[43] In response, Do-While Jones of Evolution in the News argued that "there is no conflict between Christianity and science" but rather "there is a conflict between Christianity and evolution because there is a conflict between science and the theory of evolution".[44] Later in the year Maddox declared science fiction obsolete in his essay "Fictional Reality" and was roundly criticized in the blogosphere, most notably by Scientific American's J.R. Minkel. Maddox wrote that "fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas" as a result of the "scarcity of foreseeable future", citing the decline of author Michael Crichton's work as evidence.[45] Minkel lambasted Maddox and pointed to author Neal Stephenson's cutting-edge work as proof to the contrary, venturing that "science fiction writers can dictate the future if they have the vim and vision". [46][47]

Style

Satire is evident in much of Maddox's work, from his years as editor-in-chief for SPY magazine to his numerous articles in Travel + Leisure, and his novel My Little Blue Dress. Maddox's satirical tendencies extend to his interviews and publicity materials. In one interview he made the preposterous claim that he once "spent 2 days being a personal assistant to a mafia boss in New York".[12] Maddox's Penguin biography skewers his own career, claiming he "elevated [SPY] to within spitting distance of its former glory, then accidentally bankrupted it after two short years", which led The Harvard Crimson, his alma mater's student newspaper, to speculate that "Maddox himself had a hand in writing" it.[9] Maddox's popular science columns for Discover magazine impart his own personal views on science with a markedly humorous and skeptical bent.[6][48]

Selected bibliography

Harvard University Thesis
  • — (1992). Maltese: A Gastrosophic Theory of Reading. Thesis (A.B., Honors in English and American Literature and Language)—Harvard University, 1992. pp. 120 pages. {{cite book}}: |author= has numeric name (help)
The Harvard Crimson
Novel
GEAR magazine
BlackBook magazine
  • —. "The Angriest Book Club in America", BlackBook magazine, Fall 2003, no. 29, Protest Issue, p. 186 (also reprinted in the BlackBook anthology The revolution will be accessorized).[37][49]
Travel + Leisure magazine
Discover magazine

References and notes

  1. ^ Exact date of birth obtained from Discover magazine's editorial staff. Penguin's biography of Maddox simply states his year of birth.
  2. ^ a b c "About Bruno Maddox". Penguin Group (USA). Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  3. ^ Lauren A.E. Schuker (2003-06-02). "'Late Starter' Writes On Telecommunications, Famous Women". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ a b "Green Issue's Masthead". The Week. 2007-04-23. Retrieved 2007-04-23. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ a b c Nina Blount (2001). "my little blue dress: bruno maddox talks to ivenus about the post-post-postmodern novel". iVenus.com. Retrieved 2007-08-01.
  6. ^ a b c "About Blinded By Science columns". Discover. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  7. ^ "Touching base". Nature Genetics. 28: 305. 2001. doi:10.1038/91050. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  8. ^ "About Bronwen Maddox". The Times. Retrieved 2008-01-21.
  9. ^ a b P. Patty Li (2001-05-04). "Reading. Period". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ^ Bruno Maddox (1991-02-15). "Cabot Turns Trash Into Art: Superintendent Urges Residents on to Ecolympic Laurels". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  11. ^ Bruno Maddox (1992). Maltese: A Gastrosophic Theory of Reading. Thesis (A.B., Honors in English and American Literature and Language)--Harvard University, 1992. pp. 120 pages.
  12. ^ a b c d e f Cristín Leach (2001-05-10). "Back in the (Day) Job - Bruno Maddox". Radio Telefís Éireann. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  13. ^ a b c d Bob Andelman (1997-04-14). "Mr. Media Spies on Spy!". Universal Press Syndicate. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. ^ Bruno Maddox (1994-01-23). "One Last Hurrah". The Washington Post through LexisNexis® Academic. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  15. ^ Bruno Maddox (1994-07-17). "In Short: Nonfiction". The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ^ Bruno Maddox (1996-09-29). "Monsters of Our Own Making". The Washington Post through LexisNexis® Academic. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  17. ^ Bruno Maddox (1998-03-22). "Blade Runner". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-09-01. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  18. ^ a b Neil Cassidy (1998-03-01). "Spy goes under for the last time". Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management reprinted by FindArticles.com. Retrieved 2007-04-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  19. ^ a b James Surowiecki (1997-09-02). "Media Circus: Spy vs. Spy". Salon.com. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  20. ^ Marc Santora (2006-04-09). "Reporter Was Quick Study in Art of Mingling With the Rich and Glamorous". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-08-08. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  21. ^ Sam Allis (2006-10-03). "Standing at the corner of Shakespeare and Scorsese". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2007-08-08. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  22. ^ Warren St. John (September 1999). "Agent Provocateur". Wired magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-08. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  23. ^ Brandon Robshaw (2001-06-02). "Books: A better shot at the Bloke's First Book". The Independent reprinted by FindArticles.com. Retrieved 2007-08-14. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  24. ^ Michael Garry Smout (January–February 2002). "My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox: Viking, U.S., 2001". The Barcelona Review. Retrieved 2007-08-08.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
  25. ^ a b c Maria Russo (2001-05-17). ""My Little Blue Dress" by Bruno Maddox". Salon.com. Retrieved 2007-08-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  26. ^ Emily Barton (2001-05-27). "Enough About Me". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-08-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  27. ^ Darcy Cosper (2001-10-02). "Writer's 'trifle' Aims Higher". The Hartford Courant through LexisNexis® Academic. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  28. ^ "Authors at Real Art Ways". The Hartford Courant through LexisNexis® Academic. 2001-09-20. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  29. ^ a b A note at the end of several of Maddox's book reviews read, "Bruno Maddox is adapting his novel 'My Little Blue Dress' for the screen." See Maddox's review of P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism (New York Post, June 6, 2004) and his review of George Hagen's The Laments (New York Post, June 27, 2004).
  30. ^ As of 2007 there is no further evidence that Maddox completed the script.
  31. ^ Tom Dart (2001-06-02). "All About Me". The Times through LexisNexis® Academic. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |publisher= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  32. ^ As of 2007 a second novel from Maddox has not been published.
  33. ^ Susan Kruglinski (2006-09-11). "DiscoBlog: Before it was Real (9/11)". Discover. Retrieved 2007-08-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  34. ^ Jeff Bercovici (2003-04-08). "Bob G. Jr. on what did in Gear". Media Life magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-14. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  35. ^ Jeff Bercovici (2004-04-01). "Gabbing With The Gooch". Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management reprinted by FindArticles.com. Retrieved 2007-08-14. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  36. ^ Bruno Maddox (September 2002). "Before It Was Real". GEAR magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-12. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  37. ^ a b "Diary: The ULA profiled". Gawker.com. 2003-08-01. Retrieved 2007-08-14. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  38. ^ Karl Wenclas (2006-10-06). "Distorting the Message". AttackingtheDemi-Puppets (Wenclas' blog). Retrieved 2007-08-14. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  39. ^ Bruno Maddox (October 2003). "The Concorde, R.I.P." Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  40. ^ Bruno Maddox (2005). "The Concorde, R.I.P.". In O'Reilly, James, Larry Habegger, and Sean O'Reilly (ed.). The Best Travel Writing 2005: True Stories from Around the World. San Francisco, Calif: Travelers' Tales. ISBN 9781932361162.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  41. ^ Bruno Maddox (2005-02-13). "With Friends Like These..." (PDF). The New York Post. Retrieved 2007-08-27. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  42. ^ Diego Vasquez (2007-05-02). "New York is tops in magazine awards: Takes home five Ellies, the most of any magazine". Media Life magazine. Retrieved 2007-07-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  43. ^ Maddox, Bruno (2007-02-12). "Blinded by Science: Stuck in Creationism". Discover. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  44. ^ Do-While Jones (February 2007). "A Tale of Two Museums". Evolution in the News. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  45. ^ Maddox, Bruno (2007-07-20). "Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality". Discover. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  46. ^ J.R. Minkel (2007-08-08). "Science fiction is not obsolete—do you read me Bruno Maddox?". Scientific American. Retrieved 2007-08-08. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  47. ^ Amos Kenigsberg (2007-08-09). "DiscoBlog: Sci-Fi Died... But It Came Back in a Different Form!". Discover. Retrieved 2007-08-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  48. ^ Lisa DeKeukelaere (June 2007). "Math Digest: Summaries of Media Coverage of Math". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  49. ^ Bruno Maddox (2006). "The Angriest Book Club in America". In Aaron Hicklin (ed.). The revolution will be accessorized: BlackBook presents dispatches from the new counterculture. New York: Harper Perennial. pp. pp. 49–57. ISBN 9780060847326. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  50. ^ All the Travel + Leisure articles were accessible on the magazine's web site as of August 20 2007.
  51. ^ All "Blinded by Science" columns were accessible on the Discover magazine web site as of August 20 2007.

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