as our new release of the week: The Manhattan Beach Project. By Peter Lefcourt (Simon & Schuster). Lefcourt, an LA screenwriter and author, explores the world of reality TV in his new novel. His hero, Charlie Berns, has sunk into the ranks of Hollywood bottom-feeders barely four years after winning an Oscar. Charlie is now reduced to living in his nephew’s pool house, kiting checks and taking the bus to his weekly Debtors Anonymous meeting, where he meets a mysterious ex-CIA agent who proposes to resuscitate Charlie’s foundering career. “Peter Lefcourt does for Hollywood what Christopher Buckley does for Washington: stick pins in all the right places,” says Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “Each of them writes comic novels that mix uproarious mischief with an inspired sense of the absurd. In the case of Mr. Lefcourt’s latest, the idiocy of reality television provides the dartboard. The genre was not cracked up solely to suit Mr. Lefcourt’s purposes; he just makes it seem that way.” Read an excerpt here.

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