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Candace Bushnell is the creator of SEX AND THE CITY and has been described by the EVENING STANDARD as a 'genius'. The OBSERVER compared her to Nancy Mitford and the SUNDAY TELEGRAPH to 'Jane Austen with a Martini.'
Below is a Q&A with this author.
I can’t live without… books.
If I wasn’t a writer… I’d want to be an Olympic Dressage Equestrian.
I feel most comfortable in… my own skin. You take yourself wherever you go.
The book I reread the most is… Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. The main character, Undine Sprague, is wicked and wonderfully unrepentant.
My favorite vintage piece is… a green fringed Michael Kors dress I bought in the late eighties.
The three words that describe me best are: imagination, passion, determination.
The best thing about New York City is… the people. Everyone has a story.
My mantra is: Never have a mantra. Or a favorite color.
The best decision I’ve ever made… was to believe in myself.
The best part about writing The Carrie Diaries was: Writing The Carrie Diaries! I know I’m lucky to have found work I love to do.
May 2012 New Gen Book of the Month. Meet teenage Carrie Bradshaw as she hits the bright lights, big city of New York for the very first time! Find out how Carrie transforms from country girl to super-cool fashionista in the second explosive Carrie Diaries novel from the globally bestselling author of Sex and the City. Click here for Carrie Bradshaw's Guide to New York and here for Samantha's Top 10 Tips for City Girls.
February 2011 Guest Editor Carmen Reid on Candace Bushnell... I’m crazy about Candace. How does her writing compare to the SATC TV series? The TV series is M&Ms and Candace is like silky, sinful, 70% pure dark chocolate. My favourite of her books is One Fifth Avenue: so glitteringly sophisticated and hard-edged. This is New York in the Noughties and so prophetic of the downturn. It’s packed with bad girls, ambitious girls, larger-than-life girls. But for teen romance The Carrie Diaries is a wonderful whirl. It’s Carrie: the high school years and Candace absolutely captures the huge, emotional punch of first love. The agony and fantasy as Carrie longs for Sebastian. The ecstasy when she has him. The inevitable tragedy of losing him... and to her best friend. It’s wonderful! May 2010 Book of the Month. The Lovereading view... This terrific teen prequel to ‘Sex and the City’ is a sexy, funny, coming-of-age and totally engaging look at how Carrie became THE Carrie Bradshaw. She was just a regular girl growing up in Connecticut. We meet her here in her senior year of high school. She and her best friends are inseparable and then Sebastian Kydd comes into the picture. Sebastian is a bad boy – older, intriguing and unpredictable. Carrie falls into the relationship until a friend’s betrayal makes her question everything. With an unforgettable cast of characters, The Carrie Diaries is the story of how a regular girl learns to think for herself, and evolves into a sharp, insightful writer. Readers will learn about her family background, how she found her writing voice, and the indelible impression her early friendships and relationships left on her. Through adventures both audacious and poignant, we'll see what brings Carrie to her beloved New York City, where her new life begins.
Meet teenage Carrie Bradshaw as she hits the bright lights, big city of New York for the very first time! Find out how Carrie transforms from country girl to super-cool fashionista in the second explosive CARRIE DIARIES novel from the globally bestselling author of SEX AND THE CITY. Summer is a magical time in New York City and Carrie is in love with all of it -- the crazy characters in her neighbourhood, the vintage-clothing boutiques, the wild parties and the glamorous man who has swept her off her feet. Best of all, she's finally in a real writing class, taking her first steps toward fulfilling her dream. This sequel to THE CARRIE DIARIES brings surprising revelations as Carrie learns to navigate her way around the Big Apple, going from being a country sparrow -- as Samantha Jones dubs her -- to the person she always wanted to be. But as it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile her past with her future, Carrie realises that making it in New York is much more complicated than she ever imagined. With her signature wit and sparkling humour, Candace Bushnell reveals the irresistible story of how Carrie met Samantha and Miranda, and what turned a small-town girl into one of the New York City's most unforgettable icons, Carrie Bradshaw.
February 2011 Guest Editor Carmen Reid on Candace Bushnell... I’m crazy about Candace. How does her writing compare to the SATC TV series? The TV series is M&Ms and Candace is like silky, sinful, 70% pure dark chocolate. My favourite of her books is One Fifth Avenue: so glitteringly sophisticated and hard-edged. This is New York in the Noughties and so prophetic of the downturn. It’s packed with bad girls, ambitious girls, larger-than-life girls. But for teen romance The Carrie Diaries is a wonderful whirl. It’s Carrie: the high school years and Candace absolutely captures the huge, emotional punch of first love. The agony and fantasy as Carrie longs for Sebastian. The ecstasy when she has him. The inevitable tragedy of losing him... and to her best friend. It’s wonderful! May 2010 Book of the Month. The Lovereading view... This terrific teen prequel to ‘Sex and the City’ is a sexy, funny, coming-of-age and totally engaging look at how Carrie became THE Carrie Bradshaw. She was just a regular girl growing up in Connecticut. We meet her here in her senior year of high school. She and her best friends are inseparable and then Sebastian Kydd comes into the picture. Sebastian is a bad boy – older, intriguing and unpredictable. Carrie falls into the relationship until a friend’s betrayal makes her question everything. With an unforgettable cast of characters, The Carrie Diaries is the story of how a regular girl learns to think for herself, and evolves into a sharp, insightful writer. Readers will learn about her family background, how she found her writing voice, and the indelible impression her early friendships and relationships left on her. Through adventures both audacious and poignant, we'll see what brings Carrie to her beloved New York City, where her new life begins.
February 2011 Guest Editor Carmen Reid on Candace Bushnell... I’m crazy about Candace. How does her writing compare to the SATC TV series? The TV series is M&Ms and Candace is like silky, sinful, 70% pure dark chocolate. My favourite of her books is One Fifth Avenue: so glitteringly sophisticated and hard-edged. This is New York in the Noughties and so prophetic of the downturn. It’s packed with bad girls, ambitious girls, larger-than-life girls. But for teen romance The Carrie Diaries is a wonderful whirl. It’s Carrie: the high school years and Candace absolutely captures the huge, emotional punch of first love. The agony and fantasy as Carrie longs for Sebastian. The ecstasy when she has him. The inevitable tragedy of losing him... and to her best friend. It’s wonderful! The Lovereading view... The new novel from Candace Bushnell comes filled with all the things we love about her novels – fashionable settings and characters and plenty of fabulousness. Set around the occupants in the Fifth Avenue apartment block of the title glamour, gossip and sexual politics all have their moments as the battle over real estate commences.
The new novel from Candace Bushnell comes filled with all the things we love about her novels – fashionable settings and characters and plenty of fabulousness. Set around the occupants in the Fifth Avenue apartment block of the title glamour, gossip and sexual politics all have their moments as the battle over real estate commences.
From one of the most consistently astute and engaging social commentators of our day comes another look at the tough and tender women of New York City--this time, through the lens of where they live. One Fifth Avenue, the Art Deco beauty towering over one of Manhattan's oldest and most historically hip neighborhoods, is a one-of-a-kind address, the sort of building you have to earn your way into--one way or another. For the women in Candace Bushnell's new novel, One Fifth Avenue, this edifice is essential to the lives they've carefully established--or hope to establish. From the hedge fund king's wife to the aging gossip columnist to the free-spirited actress (a recent refugee from L.A.), each person's game plan for a rich life comes together under the soaring roof of this landmark building. Acutely observed and mercilessly witty, One Fifth Avenue is a modern-day story of old and new money, that same combustible mix that Edith Wharton mastered in her novels about New York's Gilded Age and F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminated in his Jazz Age tales. Many decades later, Bushnell's New Yorkers suffer the same passions as those fictional Manhattanites from eras past: They thirst for power, for social prominence, and for marriages that are successful--at least to the public eye. But Bushnell is an original, and One Fifth Avenue is so fresh that it reads as if sexual politics, real estate theft, and fortunes lost in a day have never happened before. From Sex and the City through four successive novels, Bushnell has revealed a gift for tapping into the zeitgeist of any New York minute and, as one critic put it, staying uncannily "e;just the slightest bit ahead of the curve."e; And with each book, she has deepened her range, but with a light touch that makes her complex literary accomplishments look easy. Her stories progress so nimbly and ring so true that it can seem as if anyone might write them--when, in fact, no one writes novels quite like Candace Bushnell. Fortunately for us, with One Fifth Avenue, she has done it again.
Bushnell's beat is that demi-monde of nightclubs, bars, restaurants and parties where the rich come into contact with the infamous, the famous with the wannabes and the publicity-hungry with the gossip-peddlers' EVENING STANDARD Wildly funny, unexpectedly poignant, wickedly observant, SEX AND THE CITY blazes a glorious, drunken cocktail trail through New York, as Candace Bushnell, columnist and social critic par excellence, trips on her Manolo Blahnik kitten heels from the Baby Doll Lounge to the Bowery Bar. An Armistead Maupin for the real world, she has the gift of assembling a huge and irresistible cast of freaks and wonders, while remaining faithful to her hard core of friends and fans: those glamorous, rebellious, crazy single women, too close to forty, who are trying hard not to turn from the Audrey Hepburn of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S into the Glen Close of FATAL ATTRACTION, and are - still - looking for love.
To everyone who's anyone in New York City Victory Ford, Wendy Healy and Nico O'Neilly are the beautiful face of success in the city. Victory is the hottest new designer on the block, Wendy is President of Parador Pictures with a sure-fire hit in production and Nico is the editor of BONFIRE magazine. The trouble is, from where Victory, Nico and Wendy are standing things don't look quite that way. Nico is fitting in guilty extra-marital sex with an underwear model. Victory's last collection bombed and Wendy's twelve-year marriage to her metrosexual househusband is in freefall. Candace Bushnell's new heroines are irresistible, and as she follows them through the minefield of work, love and life at the top she gives us a hugely entertaining lesson on how to stay ahead in the toughest town on the planet.
When Janey Wilcox makes it big as a Victoria's Secret model, she finally gets the celebrity status she has always craved. Suddenly the car of her dreams is hers, and even better, so is that house in New York's exclusive Hamptons. No longer will she have to choose her boyfriends according to who has a house she can summer in. At the most exclusive of Hampton parties, Janey finds herself mingling with Hollywood celebrities and the cream of New York society. But all this is secondary when she is charmed and captivated by a handsome, successful man, a man who quickly becomes her new beau. Janey, though, is not the type to live happily ever after, especially with her chequered past of far from good behaviour...
FOUR BLONDES charts the romantic intrigues, liaisons, betrayals and victories of four modern women: a beautiful B-list model finagles rent-free summerhouses in the Hamptons from her lovers until she discovers she can get a man but can't get what she wants; a high-powered magazine columnist's floundering marriage to a literary journalist is thrown into crisis when her husband's career fails to live up to her expectations; a 'Cinderella' records her descent into paranoia in her journal as she realises she wants anybody's life except her own; an artist and aging 'It girl' - who fears that her time for finding a man has run out - travels to London in search of the kind of love and devotion she can't find in Manhattan... Studded with her trademark wit and stiletto-heel-sharp insight, FOUR BLONDES is dark, true, and compulsively readable.