Rex Pickett, author of the book Sideways (and adapted into an Oscar-, BAFTA-, and Golden Globe–winning movie) talks to Youssef Mourra about his life in wine, movies, screenplays, and books.
This collection includes the following episodes:
“Introducing Rex Pickett, Author of Sideways”“Introducing Sideways: The Life of Wine”“The Pinot Noir and the Rose”“Why Pinot Noir”“Wine Tasting”“An Update on All Things Sideways and Rex”“The Pinot Gris and the Chardonnay”“The Enduring Appeal of Sideways”“A Different Take on Food and Wine Pairings”“The Aging and the Vintage Wine”“No Fucking Merlot”“Chile and Chilean Wine”“Wine Snobbery”“Newsflash 1 - Sideways: The Play in Spain Falls Mainly on the Payne?”“Sideways: The Musical”“Miles and Jack”“The Worst Things about Men”“Why Rex Writes”“Sideways: The Movie Part I”“Sideways: The Movie Part II”“Sideways: The Movie Part III”“Sideways: The Movie Part IV”
A November Book Pick from The New York Times
When archivist Nadia Fontaine is found dead of an apparent drowning, Emily Snow is hired by Regents University to finish the job she started-to organize and process the papers of Raymond West, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been short-listed for the Nobel.
Emily's job comes with its inherent pressures. West's wife, Elizabeth, is an heiress who's about to donate $25 million to the Memorial Library-an eight-story architectural marvel that is the crown jewel of the university. The inaugural event in just a few months will be a gala for the who's who of San Diego to celebrate the unveiling of the Raymond West Collection and the financial gift that made it all possible.
As Emily sets to work on the West papers, it begins to dawn on her that several items have gone missing from the collection. To trace their whereabouts, she gains unsupervised access to the highly restricted "dark archives," in which she opens a Pandora's box of erotically and intellectually charged correspondence between Raymond West and the late Nadia Fontaine. Through their archived emails, Emily goes back a year in time and relives the tragic trajectory of their passionate love affair. Did Nadia really drown accidentally, as the police report concluded, or could it have been suicide, or, even worse, murder? Compelled to complete the collection and find the truth, Emily unwittingly morphs into an adult Nancy Drew and a one-woman archivist crusader on a mission to right the historical record.
Twisting slowly like a tourniquet, The Archivist turns into a suspenseful murder mystery with multiple and intersecting layers. Not just a whodunit, it is also a profound meditation on love, privacy, and the ethics of destroying or preserving materials of a highly personal nature.
Sideways 3 Chile follows the further adventures of Miles Raymond (played by Paul Giamatti in the now cult movie Sideways) and, to a lesser extent, his friend Jack. It’s now ten years later, and Miles is a successful author, but he’s still searching for something; depression has him, once again, in its taloned grip. Offered a chance to travel to the antipodean country of Chile and visit their wine regions for a magazine assignment, Miles, his world turned upside down by bad financial investments and even worse luck with relationships, happily agrees. A somewhat cynical Miles finds Chile, its people, and its spectacular and vastly diverse wine regions to be a life-transforming journey. The Sideways trilogy is now complete.
The follow-up novel to the blockbuster Sideways, the basis of a major motion picture, tracks the continuing story of Miles Raymond and his buddy Jack.
It's seven years later. Miles has written a novel that has been made into a wildly successful movie, and the movie has changed his life. Jack, contrarily, is divorced, has a kid, and is on the skids. Phyllis, Miles' mom, has suffered a stroke that's left her wheelchair-bound and wasting away in assisted living. She desperately wants to live with her sister in Wisconsin. When Miles gets invited to be master of ceremonies at the International Pinot Festival in Oregon, he hatches a harebrained road trip. With Jack as his copilot, he leases a handicapped-equipped van, hires a pot-smoking Filipina caretaker, and, with his mother's rascally Yorkie in tow, they take off for Wisconsin via Oregon's fabled Willamette Valley.
This is a road novel for the smart set and wine lover, and it is anything but predictable.
"Better, richer than Sideways."-Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter
Sideways is the story of two friends, Miles and Jack. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country, in this raucous and surprising novel about men, women, wine, and human relationships.
