“Before we hear what Reese has to say, let me recommend

Both authors give you a blow by blow description of what it’s like living with the worst possible circumstances, Suleika (Cancer) and Danielle, (Hitler). These books were so captivating that I missed work deadlines and cancelled social engagements. I can hear your reaction now, “I don’t want to read anything so depressing.” Yes, you do. You will become more alive and appreciative with this knowledge.” —LWH.

When her career hit a wall, the Oscar-winning actor built a ladder made of books — for herself, and for others.

By Elisabeth Egan

“You’d be shocked by how many books have women chained in basements,” Reese Witherspoon said. “I know it happens in the world. I don’t want to read a book about it.”

Nor does she want to read an academic treatise, or a 700-page novel about a tree.

Sitting in her office in Nashville, occasionally dipping into a box of takeout nachos, Witherspoon talked about what she does like to read — and what she looks for in a selection for Reese’s Book Club, which she referred to in a crisp third person.

“It needs to be optimistic,” Witherspoon said. “It needs to be shareable. Do you close this book and say, ‘I know exactly who I want to give it to?’”

But, first and foremost, she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves. “Because that’s what women do,” she said. “No one’s coming to save us.”

Witherspoon, 48, has now been a presence in the book world for a decade. Her productions of novels like “Big Little Lies,” “Little Fires Everywhere” and “The Last Thing He Told Me” are foundations of the binge-watching canon. Her book club picks reliably land on the best-seller list for weeks, months or, in the case of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” years. In 2023, print sales for the club’s selections outpaced those of Oprah’s Book Club and Read With Jenna, according to Circana Bookscan, adding up to 2.3 million copies sold.

So how did an actor who dropped out of college (fine, Stanford) become one of the most influential people in an industry known for being intractable and slightly tweedy?

It started with Witherspoon’s frustration over the film industry’s skimpy representation of women onscreen — especially seasoned, strong, smart, brave, mysterious, complicated and, yes, dangerous women.

“When I was about 34, I stopped reading interesting scripts,” she said.

Witherspoon had already made a name for herself with “Election,” “Legally Blonde” and “Walk the Line.” But, by 2010, Hollywood was in flux: Streaming services were gaining traction. DVDs were following VHS tapes to the land of forgotten technology.

“When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not the superhero movies or independent films we lose out on,” Witherspoon said. “It’s the middle, which is usually where women live. The family drama. The romantic comedy. So I decided to fund a company to make those kinds of movies.”

In 2012, she started the production company Pacific Standard with Bruna Papandrea. Its first projects were film adaptations of books: “Gone Girl” and “Wild,” which both opened in theaters in 2014.

Growing up in Nashville, Witherspoon knew the value of a library card. She caught the bug early, she said, from her grandmother, Dorothea Draper Witherspoon, who taught first grade and devoured Danielle Steel novels in a “big cozy lounger” while sipping iced tea from a glass “with a little paper towel wrapped around it.”

This attention to detail is a smoke signal of sorts: Witherspoon is a person of words.

When she was in high school, Witherspoon stayed after class to badger her English teacher — Margaret Renkl, now a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times — about books that weren’t part of the curriculum. When Witherspoon first moved to Los Angeles, books helped prepare her for the “chaos” of filmmaking; “The Making of the African Queen” by Katharine Hepburn was a particular favorite.

So it made sense that, as soon as Witherspoon joined Instagram, she started sharing book recommendations. Authors were tickled and readers shopped accordingly. In 2017, Witherspoon made it official: Reese’s Book Clubbecame a part of her new company, Hello Sunshine.

The timing was fortuitous, according to Pamela Dorman, senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, who edited the club’s inaugural pick, “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.” “The book world needed something to help boost sales in a new way,” she said.

Reese’s Book Club was that something: “Eleanor Oliphant” spent 85 weeks on the paperback best-seller list. The club’s second pick, “The Alice Network,” spent nearly four months on the weekly best-seller lists and two months on the audio list. Its third, “The Lying Game,” spent 18 weeks on the weekly lists.

“There’s nothing better than getting that phone call,” added Dorman, who has now edited two more Reese’s Book Club selections.

Kiley Reid’s debut novel, “Such a Fun Age,” got the nod in January 2020. She said, “When I was on book tour, a lot of women would tell me, ‘I haven’t read a book in four years, but I trust Reese.’” Four years later, on tour for her second novel, “Come and Get It,” Reid met women who were reading 100 books a year.

Witherspoon tapped into a sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, with a few essay collections and memoirs sprinkled in. She turned out to be the literary equivalent of a fit model — a reliable bellwether for readers in search of intelligent, discussion-worthy fare, hold the Proust. She wanted to help narrow down the choices for busy readers, she said, “to bring the book club out of your grandma’s living room and online.”

She added: “The unexpected piece of it all was the economic impact on these authors’ lives.”

One writer became the first person in her family to own a home. “She texted me a picture of the key,” Witherspoon said. “I burst into tears.”

Witherspoon considers a handful of books each month. Submissions from publishers are culled by a small group that includes Sarah Harden, chief executive of Hello Sunshine; Gretchen Schreiber, manager of books (her original title was “bookworm”); and Jon Baker, whose team at Baker Literary Scouting scours the market for promising manuscripts.

Not only is Witherspoon focused on stories by women — “the Bechdel test writ large,” Baker said — but also, “Nothing makes her happier than getting something out in the world that you might not see otherwise.”

When transgender rights were in the headlines in 2018, the club chose “This Is How It Always Is,” Laurie Frankel’s novel about a family grappling with related issues in the petri dish of their own home. “We track the long tail of our book club picks and this one, without fail, continues to sell,” Baker said.

Witherspoon’s early readers look for a balance of voices, backgrounds and experiences. They also pay attention to the calendar. “Everyone knows December and May are the busiest months for women,” Harden said, referring to the mad rush of the holidays and the end of the school year. “You don’t want to read a literary doorstop then. What do you want to read on summer break? What do you want to read in January?”

Occasionally the group chooses a book that isn’t brand-new, as with the club’s April pick, “The Most Fun We Ever Had,” from 2019. When Claire Lombardo learned that her almost-five-year-old novel had been anointed, she thought there had been a mistake; after all, her new book, “Same As it Ever Was,” is coming out next month. “It’s wild,” Lombardo said. “It’s not something that I was expecting.”

Sales of “The Most Fun We Ever Had” increased by 10,000 percent after the announcement, according to Doubleday. Within the first two weeks, 27,000 copies were sold. The book has been optioned by Hello Sunshine.

Witherspoon preferred not to elaborate on a few subjects: competition with other top-shelf book clubs (“We try not to pick the same books”); the lone author who declined to be part of hers (“I have a lot of respect for her clarity”); and the 2025 book she’s already called dibs on (“You can’t imagine that Edith Wharton or Graham Greene didn’t write it”).

But she was eager to set the record straight on two fronts. Her team doesn’t get the rights to every book — “It’s just how the cookie crumbles,” she said — and, Reese’s Book Club doesn’t make money off sales of its picks. Earnings come from brand collaborations and affiliate revenue.

This is true of all celebrity book clubs. An endorsement from one of them is a free shot of publicity, but one might argue that Reese’s Book Club does a bit more for its books and authors than most. Not only does it promote each book from hardcover to paperback, it supports authors in subsequent phases of their careers.

Take Reid, for instance. More than three years after Reese’s Book Club picked her first novel, it hosted a cover reveal for “Come and Get It,” which came out in January. This isn’t the same as a yellow seal on the cover, but it’s still a spotlight with the potential to be seen by the club’s 2.9 million Instagram followers.

“I definitely felt like I was joining a very large community,” Reid said.

“Alum” writers tend to stay connected with one another via social media, swapping woot woots and advice. They’re also invited to participate in Hello Sunshine events and Lit Up, a mentorship program for underrepresented writers. Participants get editing and coaching from Reese’s Book Club authors, plus a marketing commitment from the club when their manuscripts are submitted to agents and editors.

“I describe publishing and where we sit in terms of being on a river,” Schreiber said. “We’re downstream; we’re looking at what they’re picking. Lit Up gave us the ability to look upstream and say, ‘We’d like to make a change here.’”

The first Lit Up-incubated novel, “Time and Time Again” by Chatham Greenfield, is coming out from Bloomsbury YA in July. Five more fellows have announced the sales of their books.

As Reese’s Book Club approaches a milestone — the 100th pick, to be announced in September — it continues to adapt to changes in the market. Print sales for club selections peaked at five million in 2020, and they’ve softened since then, according to Circana Bookscan. In 2021, Candle Media, a Blackstone-backed media company, bought Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Witherspoon is a member of Candle Media’s board. She is currently co-producing a “Legally Blonde” prequel series for Amazon Prime Video.

This month, Reese’s Book Club will unveil an exclusive audio partnership with Apple, allowing readers to find all the picks in one place on the Apple Books app. “I want people to stop saying, ‘I didn’t really read it, I just listened,’” Witherspoon said. “Stop that. If you listened, you read it. There’s no right way to absorb a book.”

She feels that Hollywood has changed over the years: “Consumers are more discerning about wanting to hear stories that are generated by a woman.”

Even as she’s looking forward, Witherspoon remembers her grandmother, the one who set her on this path.

“Somebody came up to me at the gym the other day and he said” — here she put on a gentle Southern drawl — “‘I’m going to tell you something I bet you didn’t hear today.’ And he goes, ‘Your grandma taught me how to read.’”

Another smoke signal, and a reminder of what lives on.

Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.

We were so honored that the owner of Books & Books, Mitchell Kaplan, attended and participated in the book signing party for “Fearless Flying Fannie.” This was a dream come true. Mitchell is one of the most respected members of the book industry. He is one of the best reasons to live in Miami. Books & Books is considered to be the best book store chain in the country. Thank you Mitchell. We will remember your generosity forever. Thank you everyone who took photos of this event.

An auditorium filled with Democrats and concerned Republicans were in attendance last night at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami to hear former congresswoman Liz Cheney warn Americans that we are living in very dangerous times. She said “if Donald Trump gets into office your children will be living under a dictatorship. It’s the end of freedom in America.” She was interviewed by Republican political strategist and television commentator Ana Navarro about her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning.

The two women both admitted that the Republican Party is falling apart because everyone is afraid of Trump. Politicians who have been chastised by Trump, in the most embarrassing ways, are pretending to support him because they are afraid they will lose their positions.

The women were ruthless when discussing how many different groups in America should fear for their lives. They named the groups but I don’t have the heart to list them. The entire audience gave them a standing ovation several times during the discussion.

Cheney’s recent book about the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the Wyoming Republican’s experience on the Congressional Select Committee that investigated the insurrection and her views on former president Donald Trump and his supporters.

I posted all of the above on Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. My girl friend Gail shared my post and added a very important fact. Liz Cheney’s response regarding the ages of Biden and Trump, “Yes, they are both old, but only one is depraved! I wish people would wake up. Trump has told us he wants to be a dictator. He is a serious threat to our democracy and constitution.”

Thanking Members For Our Support | Annual Celebration of Generosity—Baptist Health Foundation.

Thank you for joining us at the Annual Celebration of Generosity honoring our major donors and Corporate Philanthropy Partners. Over 200 guests attended the reception at the Loews Coral Gables Hotel event and enjoyed cocktails, dinner and live entertainment.

Your belief in Baptist Health Foundation is making an enormous impact. Last year alone…
$60.6 million was raised through your generosity
$30 million was raised in support of our Institutes
$5 million was donated to establish new Endowed Chairs
More than $10.5 million was raised in support of research at Baptist Health
More than 60 clinical trials and research projects were funded across several Baptist Health institutes
Thank you for your commitment and dedication to Baptist Health. We are so grateful for your generosity.
Sincerely,
Alex Villoch
Chief Executive Officer
Baptist Health Foundation

Consider yourself schooled 😉

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out — we don’t serve your type.”
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

The crowd was so thick we could hardly see the painting. —LWH

Louvre Considers Moving Mona Lisa To Underground Chamber To End ‘Public Disappointment’

BY KAREN K. HO

When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting.

This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait “the world’s most disappointing masterpiece.” 

Da Vinci’s iconic image of an almost-smiling woman is protected by bullet-proof, anti-reflective glass, along with tightly-controlled temperature and humidity settings to ensure the painting’s conservation.

In an effort to remedy this situation, the Mona Lisa may be moved to an underground chamber, according to a report in The TelegraphTuesday.

Louvre director Laurence des Cars recently suggested the relocation of the popular artwork to a dedicated room constructed in the institution’s basement.

“We don’t welcome visitors very well in this room, so we feel we’re not doing our job properly,” de Cars told staff and supervisors. “Moving the Mona Lisa to a separate room could put an end to public disappointment.”

“We’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but this time everyone is in agreement,” Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre’s chief curator of 16th-century Italian painting told the French newspaper Le Figaro.

“It’s a large room, and the Mona Lisa is at the back, behind its security glass, so at first glance it looks like a postage stamp,” he said.

The Louvre receives nine million visitors annually, and according to museum officials, the Mona Lisais the main attraction for 80 per cent of those people. During especially busy days, 250,000 people stand in the same line my mother and I did.

The painting’s popularity has prompted other attempts to improve the viewing experience, including a repainting of the gallery’s walls from eggshell yellow to midnight blue in 2019, as well as a shift in the queuing system for visitors.

But Delieuvin said that the impact of social media and mass tourism means a greater effort is required, especially after the artwork’s celebrity has risen after its theft in 1911. 

“In this day and age, you have to have seen something that everyone is talking about at least once in your life, and the Mona Lisa is clearly one of those ‘must sees’,” the curator said.

A new underground chamber for painting would be part of a future “Grand Louvre” renovation, with a new entrance to the museum. Visitors would bypass the glass pyramid entry and be lead directly to underground rooms: one for the Mona Lisa and the other for temporary exhibitions.

“The mood in the museum is now ripe,” said des Cars. “We have to embrace the painting’s status as a global icon, which is beyond our control.”

The budget for the Louvre’s overhaul is estimated at €500 million, according to Le Figaro. But the French economy has yielded worse-than-expected debt and deficit forecasts, resulting in President Emmanuel Macron’s government trying to reduce state spending by €25 billion in its next annual budget.

The Mona Lisa was also the site of a protest in January, after activists threw pumpkin soup at it. The painting suffered no damage, but the incident was denounced by culture minister Rachida Dati as an attack on French heritage.

SUSTAINABILITY

Daniel Humm courted disaster when he leaned into sustainability and reinvented Eleven Madison Park with a vegan menu.

BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER 

Eleven Madison Park is the kind of restaurant that’s sometimes called a temple of fine dining. In early 2020, Vanity Fair described its duck as “life-changing.” The following year, however, chef and owner Daniel Humm transitioned the Michelin-starred New York City restaurant to an entirely plant-based menu. Switching to vegan dishes meant blowing up the very foundation of his business. Humm believed his restaurant could be an example of how the industry could become more sustainable. But would people pay $400 a head for a vegan dinner?

When Eleven Madison Park reopened in June 2021, it faced a tidal wave of skepticism. A New York Times reviewer panned the restaurant, writing that a beet dish tasted like “Lemon Pledge” and smelled like a “burning joint.” While Eleven Madison Park no longer has a reputation for impossible-to-get tables, the dining room is full and buzzing again. It’s also the first entirely plant-based restaurant to receive three Michelin stars. Inc. spoke to Humm to hear about how he pulled off his plant-based pivot. –As told to Jennifer Conrad

.

“I was a competitive cyclist when I was young and then had an accident and decided to become a chef. I started climbing this mountain of working for the best [restaurants] and winning awards. In 2017, we became the best restaurant in the world [on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list], and that was sort of the last of the awards. That moment was one of the most disorienting times for me. The whole world is looking at us and opportunities are starting to pour in. For 20 years, every day we talked about how to become the best restaurant in the world. Never for a moment did we talk about what would happen if we reached it.

“During the pandemic I’m like, I did it all. And I enjoyed that climb, but then it just felt emptier and emptier. There was a night where the city was getting shut down. We had everyone together and said, ‘We’re going to clean up, and we’re going to see each other in a few weeks.’ That team has never been together again. We were closed for 16 months. We were facing bankruptcy. We lost a lot of our team because we couldn’t continue to pay them, and that was super heartbreaking.

“I’m a co-founder of an organization called Rethink Food. In New York, before the pandemic there were a million [people who] were food insecure. Within the first two weeks, that number doubled. I decided that we would bring some chefs back, and turn Eleven Madison Park into a community kitchen. We started cooking meals in these little cardboard boxes, like 6,000 meals a day. I felt for the first time in my entire life that my work cooking actually matters.

“You don’t need to be an expert to understand that the food system has issues and that animal farming is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. I wanted to take it to the extreme with Eleven Madison Park, to go fully plant-based, because it pushed us as creatives. We had to take butter away. We had to create a new language: What is the new creaminess or what can add viscosity to a stock? I’m so happy with it because it created this whole new cuisine. We started a farm in Upstate New York. We’re taking inspiration from ancient cuisines from all around the world. Before we just looked at France.

“You’ve got to really nurture [new ideas] before letting other people in. If we’d had 200 people on the payroll in a restaurant that’s in motion, so many people would have told me ‘it will never work’ that I would have been way too scared to do it.

“As we got closer to reopening, I couldn’t sleep at night. ‘We just had almost two years of no money, and now we’re opening a restaurant that is only vegetables. Will anyone even come?’ I’m realizing this isn’t just an artistic endeavor. ‘People are back on the payroll. If [guests] don’t come, then then this whole thing doesn’t matter. If we fail, then no one else is going to try to do it.’

“The first year was very hard. I had to dig very, very deep into me, and the team did as well. I’ve learned a lot from criticism, but the truth is, we believed in the product so much. We really went internal for almost a year, gave no interviews, nothing. We focused on the work. It was like a whisper campaign. We wanted everyone eating here [to become] our ambassador. 

“In the darkest of times, it was like, ‘Do we need to bring meat back? Because if this doesn’t work, then 200 people are out of a job.’ Thankfully, we all held each other accountable and said, ‘It’s tough right now, but let’s continue.’ All of a sudden, we saw light again and little things happened. It almost felt like at the very beginning of my career.

“A new universe of influential, important people started coming in, like Malala Yousafzai, people from the U.N., food activists. Our audience is younger. It’s more diverse. It’s people who put their money to something that matters. And, by the way, your experience is way more luxurious than ever before because this is something you can only get in one place.

“A big turning point was when we became the first restaurant to get three Michelin stars as a fully plant-based restaurant. I never saw this coming. Other things started to happen too: We’ve been part of the documentary You Are What You Eat on Netflix. There’s a new investor group that is interested in partnering with me, because we have proven that this is sustainable and viable. It’s a beautiful thing. 

“Even if only a little bit of what we do trickles into the mainstream, to me that is what winning looks like today. I don’t believe the entire world needs to be plant-based. But maybe we think a lot more about what we eat.

“If you really want to make change, you have to have a mindset of progress over perfection. You’ve got to try something. It’s less challenging for a smaller restaurant because they’re not under such a microscope. Maybe they have one vegetable option and maybe over time they have three. Try eliminating plastic or stop using plastic wrap. Maybe there are other areas where you’re not perfect, and that’s fine.”

Hello from Fannie of Fearless Flying Fannie. I want the little girl in your life to reach her adult dreams. Email loisw@hwhpr.com to get my good luck pin. Every bit of encouragement helps. Go girl go!

Fearless Flying Fannie Has Created a Good Luck Pin To Remind Young Girls Of Their Own Unique, Special Powers

 

Author Eliot Hess Describes The Significance Of The Feathers In The Story

 

Pins Will Be Distributed At All Personal Appearances

 

 

Fearless Flying Fannie by Eliot Hess will be released by Genius Cats Books on April 16, 2024.  Pre-orders are now available at all online booksellers. 

 

First book party signing at Books & Books, Coral Gables, FL. Sunday, April 21, 2024, 11AM

 

Reader can preorder from Books & Books now!https://shop.booksandbooks.com/book/9781938447952

 

(If you know of a children’s charity, Eliot Hess would like to donate a few books in your honor. Please see contact information below)

 

 

 

listen to my latest podcast. I asked Avi Ivan every possible question about his travels and then some. He has traveled to 69.1 per cent of the earth, checking out different worlds and looking at the art that the region reflects. He had the guts to do what most of us never had the opportunity to do. He certainly changed my attitude on life after this interview. Let’s see what he does to yours.

Art Lovers Forum Podcast – Episode 13 – Avi Ivan
 

This is the first Art Lovers Forum I am doing extemporaneously. I usually have a prepared introduction with a list of questions. I guess my free spirited, number 13 episode, is appropriate for the art explorer I am about to interview. Avi Ivan has traveled to 69.1 per cent of the earth studying art. The list of places he has traveled to is below. I met Avi in South Africa. It was happenstance. He joined a group, Fountainhead Arts, that Eliot and I were touring with. Everyone in the group was fascinated by Avi’s travels so I wanted him to tell us more on this podcast. Welcome Avi.

 

Listen to episode 13 of the Art Lovers Forum podcast here – https://www.artloversforum.com/e/episode-13-avi-ivan/

       

The Art Lovers Forum Podcast is also available on popular podcast sites:

 

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/art-lovers-forum-podcast/id1725034621

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/5FkkeWv83Hs4ADm13ctTZi

Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/77484212-60c5-4026-a96f-bd2d4ae955c6

Audible – https://www.audible.com/pd/Art-Lovers-Forum-Podcast-Podcast/B0CRR1XYLZ

iHeartRadio – https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-art-lovers-forum-podcast-141592278/  

 

 

 

 

Contact:

Lois Whitman-Hess

loisw@hwhpr.com