The New York Times best-seller tells the story of the Stocktons, a WASPy family living in Brooklyn Heights, who made their considerable fortune in New York real estate. But surely the year's most-hyped novel is Pineapple Street, the brilliant debut by the US editor-turned-author Jenny Jackson that's been dubbed a "delicious new Gilded Age family drama" by Vogue, and optioned for television. A former private tutor to the kids of billionaires, Sarah Thomas takes us inside the world of Russian oligarchs in her debut Queen K, while Ellery Lloyd's new thriller The Club is set at an ultra-exclusive members' club on a private island, and has been picked for Reese Witherspoon's book club. Several of 2023's hotly-tipped novels are about the one per cent. There's a reason so many pre-20th-Century "classics" are about the upper echelons of society, and it isn't just that readers find them fascinating.
Of course, this is partly because for their first couple of hundred years, most novelists had to be reasonably well-off to afford such a career. And arguably novels are the ur-texts for our obsession with the rich and fabulous. The trend is by no means confined to the screen – interestingly, the Succession scripts have recently been published in book form by literary publisher Faber. 12 of the best books of the year so far
Why the super-rich love understated dressing In fact, our hunger for such stories seems insatiable. To what extent these are firing shots in some new class war is highly debatable, but one thing is for sure: we absolutely eat up content about the rich. Think Succession (reaching its finale this weekend), Parasite, The Menu, Glass Onion, The White Lotus and Triangle of Sadness.
The slogan "eat the rich", apocryphally attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau during the French Revolution, has seen quite the resurgence in recent years – becoming a rallying hashtag on TikTok and twitter, and used to describe a wave of films and TV shows that gleefully enact revenge on the super-wealthy.
0 kommentar(er)
