Bruno Maddox
Encyclopedia
Bruno P. Maddox is a British
literary novelist
and journalist who is best known for his critically lauded novel My Little Blue Dress (2001) and for his satirical magazine essays.
After graduating from Harvard University
in 1992, Maddox began his career reviewing books for The New York Times Book Review
and The Washington Post
Book World. In early 1996, he was appointed to an editorship at Spy
magazine and within a few months he was promoted to editor-in-chief, a position he held until the magazine shut down in 1998. Maddox wrote My Little Blue Dress between 1999 and 2001. Since its publication, he has focused on writing satirical essays for magazines such as GEAR
and Travel + Leisure
; he also contributes a monthly humor column to Discover
magazine called "Blinded by Science", drawing on his early exposure to science and technology. Maddox is likewise a contributing editor
to the American edition of The Week
magazine.
in 1969 to former Nature
editor Sir John Maddox
, a writer on science and nature, and Brenda Maddox
, a biographer of Rosalind Franklin
, W.B. Yeats, Nora Barnacle
and several others. He has one sister, Bronwen
, who became a journalist and is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times
as of 2008. Maddox enjoyed a privileged life during his childhood and youth, because of his father's position as editor of Nature, encountering some of the leading scientific thinkers of the day and enjoying dinners with figures such as James Watson
and Sir Fred Hoyle.
Despite his family's background in science, Maddox was interested in the humanities
while he attended Westminster School
, an independent boys' school in London. Maddox went on to study English literature
at Harvard University
and graduated in 1992. He published his first and only article in the student newspaper
The Harvard Crimson
during his senior year. He won the undergraduate Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize
for his senior thesis "on the use of adjectives in restaurant menus" titled Maltese: A Gastrosophic Theory of Reading. After graduation Maddox moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts
to Moscow
—where he worked for three weeks as the English-language editor of a Russian magazine—and then to New York City
, where he spent two years working odd jobs, including hand-delivering celebrity invitations to local parties.
Maddox's freelance writing career began in 1994, when he became a book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review
and The Washington Post
, where he developed a reputation for writing scathing reviews that would later help him land a job as an editor at Spy
magazine. Maddox described his book reviewing style as "pretty vicious", and quipped that he "was a frustrated, twenty-something guy, sitting in his bedroom venting existential rage on these nasty academics". His last book review for The Washington Post was in late 1996; however, he continued reviewing for The New York Times up until 1998, contributing only a couple of reviews thereafter.
At the beginning of the dot-com boom, Maddox found full-time work at an information technology
company, where he worked for a year and a half.
magazine, a satirical monthly, in New York City. Spy had ceased publication in 1994 but was quickly resuscitated under new ownership by Sussex Publishers Inc., which reduced the magazine's frequency from ten to six issues a year. At Spy, Maddox was assisted by deputy editor Adam Lehner, a satirist. In December 1996, Maddox was promoted to editor-in-chief; his editorial team included Jared Paul Stern
and, beginning in late 1997, future screenwriter William Monahan
.
Maddox wanted to turn Spy into a national magazine rather than build on its legacy of covering stories that centered on New York. According to Maddox, two factors motivated the shift of target market
. The magazine's past objects of satire, the "cheesy villains who anointed themselves as targets" in the 1980s, were no longer on the national stage. Meanwhile, the "sins of the '90s [were] those of a private, quiet cultivation of a sense of purity", and were harder to expose or ridicule.
In early 1998, Sussex Publishers increased Spy' s frequency from six to nine issues a year in an effort to boost readership and ad pages. Spys paid circulation continued to drop during Maddox's tenure, and in March 1998, the magazine once again ceased publication. Sussex's President and CEO John Colman concluded that "[despite the] great work by Bruno and his team, there just wasn't the [advertiser and consumer] acceptance that we need to make it financially viable". Maddox conceded that "a satirical magazine in New York in the late Nineties really had no function", because "everyone was being very modest and coy".
, My Little Blue Dress, to a German publisher based on a five-page fax proposal he sent on the advice of his literary agent
John Brockman
. Within a week Brockman managed to sell the rights to the novel to publishers in an additional eight countries on the strength of the proposal alone. (Maddox had not yet written even an initial manuscript
.)
My Little Blue Dress was published in 2001 by Viking Press
, a Penguin Group
imprint
. The novel begins as a memoir
of a hundred-year-old woman, but several chapters later reveals itself to be a spoof of the genre. The protagonist is a fictional Bruno Maddox who is desperately attempting to create a forgery of an old woman's memoir in a single night. Several book reviewers avoided spoiling the novel's satire but others gave away its premise, reasoning that the publisher "reveal[s] all on the book jacket anyway". The novel's intrigue lies in the mysterious reason compelling the fictional Maddox to forge a memoir.
Critics applauded My Little Blue Dress but also expressed some reservations. For example, Salon.com
's Maria Russo cautioned that the novel "is one of those 'don't try this at home' literary experiments that could easily have turned into an unreadable, pretentious disaster", but concluded that Maddox "pulls it off with a kind of fearless pizzazz". The New York Times Emily Barton
conceded that "for all its blunders", Maddox delivers "a winsome and vastly entertaining novel".
In an interview, Maddox praised Bret Easton Ellis
’s 1991 novel American Psycho
, stating that he drew inspiration from protagonist Patrick Bateman
's long-winded monologues about Phil Collins
, restaurants, clothes, and how to remove blood from his carpets.
In 2001, Maddox promoted his first novel on a joint book tour billed as the "Minor Novelists Tour" with his friend William Monahan
, another former Spy editor, but it was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks. Monahan's Light House: A Trifle
was also published by a Penguin imprint. Several years later, Maddox gave some indication that he was working on a film adaptation
of My Little Blue Dress, but it is unknown whether Maddox completed the script.
Since 2001, Maddox has written numerous articles for popular magazines, such as the now-defunct GEAR
. Published one year after the September 11, 2001 attacks
, his essay "Before It Was Real" describes the callousness of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center
through the experience of playing a flight simulator
game. Another example of Maddox's work is his 2003 profile of Karl Wenclas
, leader of the Underground Literary Alliance
, titled "The Angriest Book Club in America" and published in the fashion magazine BlackBook
. Wenclas later derided Maddox for distorting the Underground Literary Alliance in his BlackBook essay and summed up the article as "riddled with falsehoods".
In late 2003, Maddox began to contribute articles regularly to Travel + Leisure
. His first article in the magazine was called "The Concorde, R.I.P.", which chronicled his flight aboard the supersonic Concorde
airplane before it was decommissioned; it was later included in The Best Travel Writing 2005, the second volume of the annual Travelers’ Tales series. In 2004 Maddox began working as a contributing editor
for the American edition of The Week
magazine and as of 2007 continues to contribute weekly to the print issue, handling sections including "Main Stories", "Talking Points", and "Only in America". He also reviewed several books for The New York Post in 2004 and 2005.
In 2006, Maddox began contributing a regular humor column called "Blinded by Science" to Discover magazine. His writing draws upon his childhood exposure to science; due to his father's career, his family was immersed in science and he was regularly exposed to scientists at social events. Maddox's first year's columns earned him a nod as a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Award
s' "Columns and Commentary" category.
Maddox's Discover columns are occasionally criticized; his essay "Fictional Reality", in particular, has been controversial. Maddox declared science fiction
obsolete in his essay "Fictional Reality" and was roundly criticized in the blogosphere
, most notably by Scientific American
' s J.R. Minkel. Maddox wrote that "fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas" as a result of the "scarcity of foreseeable future", citing the decline of author Michael Crichton
's work as evidence. Minkel lambasted Maddox and pointed to author Neal Stephenson
's cutting-edge work as proof to the contrary, venturing that "science fiction writers can dictate the future if they have the vim and vision".
One of Maddox's most recent Discover essays, "The James Watson Affair", examines comments made by James Watson
in an article in London's Sunday Times
which led to Watson's suspension at the laboratory where he worked and his eventual retirement, and is skeptical of critics who found Watson's comment about black employees "not that big a deal" yet charged him with racism for his proposition on black African intelligence; in conclusion, Maddox derides the views held by several critics, stating that in comparison to Watson's statements, "the most ignorant and hurtful idea of all, of course, is that the entire topic of race and genes and intelligence is off-limits to all right-thinking, compassionate people, just on principle", which pejoratively assumes "that some races are innately and immutably much less intelligent than others". Maddox's essay, although published in the March 2008 printed edition of Discover, has not been published online.
is evident in much of Maddox's work, from his years as editor-in-chief for Spy
magazine to his numerous articles in Travel + Leisure
, and his novel My Little Blue Dress. Maddox's satirical tendencies extend to his interviews and publicity materials. In one interview he made the preposterous claim that he once "spent 2 days being a personal assistant to a mafia boss in New York". Maddox's Penguin
biography skewers his own career, claiming he "elevated [Spy] to within spitting distance of its former glory, then accidentally bankrupted it after two short years", which led The Harvard Crimson
, his alma mater's student newspaper, to speculate that "Maddox himself had a hand in writing" it. Maddox's popular science
columns for Discover
magazine impart his own personal views on science with a markedly humorous and skeptical bent.
The Harvard Crimson
Novel
GEAR magazine
BlackBook magazine
Travel + Leisure magazine
Discover magazine
GQ magazine
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
literary novelist
Literary fiction
Literary fiction is a term that came into common usage during the early 1960s. The term is principally used to distinguish "serious fiction" which is a work that claims to hold literary merit, in comparison from genre fiction and popular fiction . In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more upon...
and journalist who is best known for his critically lauded novel My Little Blue Dress (2001) and for his satirical magazine essays.
After graduating from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in 1992, Maddox began his career reviewing books for The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
and The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
Book World. In early 1996, he was appointed to an editorship at Spy
Spy (magazine)
Spy was a satirical monthly magazine founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998...
magazine and within a few months he was promoted to editor-in-chief, a position he held until the magazine shut down in 1998. Maddox wrote My Little Blue Dress between 1999 and 2001. Since its publication, he has focused on writing satirical essays for magazines such as GEAR
Gear (magazine)
Gear was an English language lad's mag published by Bob Guccione, Jr. in the United Kingdom devoted chiefly to revealing pictorials of popular singers, B-movie actresses, and models, along with articles on gadgets, cars, fashion, guy tales of sex, and sports.Gear debuted in September 1998, with...
and Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure is a travel magazine based in New York City, New York. Published 12 times a year, it has 4.8 million readers, according to its corporate media kit. It is put out by American Express Publishing Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Express Company led by...
; he also contributes a monthly humor column to Discover
Discover (magazine)
Discover is an American science magazine that publishes articles about science for a general audience. The monthly magazine was launched in October 1980 by Time Inc. It was sold to Family Media, the owners of Health, in 1987. Walt Disney Company bought the magazine when Family Media went out of...
magazine called "Blinded by Science", drawing on his early exposure to science and technology. Maddox is likewise a contributing editor
Contributing editor
A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. The contributing editor regularly contributes articles to the publication but does not actually edit articles, and the title...
to the American edition of The Week
The Week
The Week, styled as THE WEEK, is a weekly news magazine.-History:It was founded in the United Kingdom by Jolyon Connell in 1995. In April 2001, the magazine began publishing an American edition; an Australian edition followed in October 2008. Dennis Publishing publishes the U.K. and Australian...
magazine.
Early years
Maddox was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1969 to former Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
editor Sir John Maddox
John Maddox
Sir John Royden Maddox, FRS was a British science writer. He was an editor of Nature for 22 years, from 1966–1973 and 1980-1995.-Career:...
, a writer on science and nature, and Brenda Maddox
Brenda Maddox
Brenda Maddox FRSL is an American author, journalist, and biographer, who has lived in the UK since 1959.Born in Brockton, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English literature and also studied at the London School of Economics...
, a biographer of Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite...
, W.B. Yeats, Nora Barnacle
Nora Barnacle
Nora Barnacle was the lover, companion, inspiration, and eventual wife of author James Joyce.-Biography:Nora Barnacle was born in the town of Galway, Ireland, but the day of her birth is uncertain. Depending on the source, it varies between the 21st and the 24th of March 1884...
and several others. He has one sister, Bronwen
Bronwen Maddox
Bronwen Maddox is a British-American journalist. She is the daughter of the Welsh science writer Sir John Maddox and the journalist and biographer Brenda Maddox.-Biography:...
, who became a journalist and is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
as of 2008. Maddox enjoyed a privileged life during his childhood and youth, because of his father's position as editor of Nature, encountering some of the leading scientific thinkers of the day and enjoying dinners with figures such as James Watson
James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick...
and Sir Fred Hoyle.
Despite his family's background in science, Maddox was interested in the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
while he attended Westminster School
Westminster School
The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...
, an independent boys' school in London. Maddox went on to study English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and graduated in 1992. He published his first and only article in the student newspaper
Student newspaper
A student newspaper is a newspaper run by students of a university, high school, middle school, or other school. These papers traditionally cover local and, primarily, school or university news....
The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...
during his senior year. He won the undergraduate Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize
Thomas T. Hoopes, Class of 1919, Prize
The Hoopes Prize is an award given annually to Harvard University undergraduates, and is considered one of thehighest academic commendations the University can bestow upon an undergraduate....
for his senior thesis "on the use of adjectives in restaurant menus" titled Maltese: A Gastrosophic Theory of Reading. After graduation Maddox moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
—where he worked for three weeks as the English-language editor of a Russian magazine—and then to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, where he spent two years working odd jobs, including hand-delivering celebrity invitations to local parties.
Maddox's freelance writing career began in 1994, when he became a book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
and The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, where he developed a reputation for writing scathing reviews that would later help him land a job as an editor at Spy
Spy (magazine)
Spy was a satirical monthly magazine founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998...
magazine. Maddox described his book reviewing style as "pretty vicious", and quipped that he "was a frustrated, twenty-something guy, sitting in his bedroom venting existential rage on these nasty academics". His last book review for The Washington Post was in late 1996; however, he continued reviewing for The New York Times up until 1998, contributing only a couple of reviews thereafter.
At the beginning of the dot-com boom, Maddox found full-time work at an information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
company, where he worked for a year and a half.
Editorship of Spy magazine
In mid-1996, Maddox was hired as a senior editor at SpySpy (magazine)
Spy was a satirical monthly magazine founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998...
magazine, a satirical monthly, in New York City. Spy had ceased publication in 1994 but was quickly resuscitated under new ownership by Sussex Publishers Inc., which reduced the magazine's frequency from ten to six issues a year. At Spy, Maddox was assisted by deputy editor Adam Lehner, a satirist. In December 1996, Maddox was promoted to editor-in-chief; his editorial team included Jared Paul Stern
Jared Paul Stern
Jared Paul Stern is a freelance reporter and former columnist for the New York Post who gained national notoriety when he was accused by California businessman Ron Burkle of extortion. Prior to the scandal, Stern had written for the popular "Page Six" column for 11 years...
and, beginning in late 1997, future screenwriter William Monahan
William Monahan
William J. Monahan is an American screenwriter and novelist. His second produced screenplay was The Departed, a film which earned him a WGA award and an Academy award for Best Adapted Screenplay.-Writer and editor:...
.
Maddox wanted to turn Spy into a national magazine rather than build on its legacy of covering stories that centered on New York. According to Maddox, two factors motivated the shift of target market
Target market
A target market is a group of customers that the business has decided to aim its marketing efforts and ultimately its merchandise. A well-defined target market is the first element to a marketing strategy...
. The magazine's past objects of satire, the "cheesy villains who anointed themselves as targets" in the 1980s, were no longer on the national stage. Meanwhile, the "sins of the '90s [were] those of a private, quiet cultivation of a sense of purity", and were harder to expose or ridicule.
In early 1998, Sussex Publishers increased Spy
My Little Blue Dress
In 1999, Maddox sold the advance rights to his first novelNovel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, My Little Blue Dress, to a German publisher based on a five-page fax proposal he sent on the advice of his literary agent
Literary agent
A literary agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers and film producers and assists in the sale and deal negotiation of the same. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwriters and major non-fiction writers...
John Brockman
John Brockman (literary agent)
John Brockman is a literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He founded the Edge Foundation, an organization aimed to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields. Referencing C.P...
. Within a week Brockman managed to sell the rights to the novel to publishers in an additional eight countries on the strength of the proposal alone. (Maddox had not yet written even an initial manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
.)
My Little Blue Dress was published in 2001 by Viking Press
Viking Press
Viking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...
, a Penguin Group
Penguin Group
The Penguin Group is a trade book publisher, the largest in the world , having overtaken Random House in 2009. The Penguin Group is the name of the incorporated division of parent Pearson PLC that oversees these publishing operations...
imprint
Imprint
In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...
. The novel begins as a memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
of a hundred-year-old woman, but several chapters later reveals itself to be a spoof of the genre. The protagonist is a fictional Bruno Maddox who is desperately attempting to create a forgery of an old woman's memoir in a single night. Several book reviewers avoided spoiling the novel's satire but others gave away its premise, reasoning that the publisher "reveal[s] all on the book jacket anyway". The novel's intrigue lies in the mysterious reason compelling the fictional Maddox to forge a memoir.
Critics applauded My Little Blue Dress but also expressed some reservations. For example, Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
's Maria Russo cautioned that the novel "is one of those 'don't try this at home' literary experiments that could easily have turned into an unreadable, pretentious disaster", but concluded that Maddox "pulls it off with a kind of fearless pizzazz". The New York Times Emily Barton
Emily Barton
Emily Barton is an American novelist, critic, and academic. She is the author of two novels: The Testament of Yves Gundron and Brookland .-Background and education:...
conceded that "for all its blunders", Maddox delivers "a winsome and vastly entertaining novel".
In an interview, Maddox praised Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 different languages. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney...
’s 1991 novel American Psycho
American Psycho
American Psycho is a psychological thriller and satirical novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by the protagonist, serial killer and Manhattan businessman Patrick Bateman. The book's graphic violence and sexual content generated a great deal of...
, stating that he drew inspiration from protagonist Patrick Bateman
Patrick Bateman
Patrick Bateman is a fictional character, the antihero and narrator of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and its film adaptation. He has also briefly appeared in other Ellis novels.-Biography and profile:...
's long-winded monologues about Phil Collins
Phil Collins
Philip David Charles "Phil" Collins, LVO is an English singer-songwriter, drummer, pianist and actor best known as a drummer and vocalist for British progressive rock group Genesis and as a solo artist....
, restaurants, clothes, and how to remove blood from his carpets.
In 2001, Maddox promoted his first novel on a joint book tour billed as the "Minor Novelists Tour" with his friend William Monahan
William Monahan
William J. Monahan is an American screenwriter and novelist. His second produced screenplay was The Departed, a film which earned him a WGA award and an Academy award for Best Adapted Screenplay.-Writer and editor:...
, another former Spy editor, but it was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks. Monahan's Light House: A Trifle
Light House: A Trifle
Light House: A Trifle, a 2000 satirical novel by American screenwriter William Monahan. Originally serialized in the Amherst literary magazine Old Crow Review from 1993 to 1995, Monahan sold Light House to Riverhead Books, a Penguin Group imprint, in 1998. Warner Bros...
was also published by a Penguin imprint. Several years later, Maddox gave some indication that he was working on a film adaptation
Film adaptation
Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film. It is a type of derivative work.A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a feature film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction , autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even...
of My Little Blue Dress, but it is unknown whether Maddox completed the script.
Recent essays
After the publication of My Little Blue Dress in 2001, Maddox was reportedly working on a second novel set in California, where "everyone's aspirational and deluded" and the "people are quite happy being waiters and dreaming of stardom". As of 2009, however, no manuscript has been forthcoming.Since 2001, Maddox has written numerous articles for popular magazines, such as the now-defunct GEAR
Gear (magazine)
Gear was an English language lad's mag published by Bob Guccione, Jr. in the United Kingdom devoted chiefly to revealing pictorials of popular singers, B-movie actresses, and models, along with articles on gadgets, cars, fashion, guy tales of sex, and sports.Gear debuted in September 1998, with...
. Published one year after the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
, his essay "Before It Was Real" describes the callousness of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center
World Trade Center
The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with five new...
through the experience of playing a flight simulator
Flight simulator
A flight simulator is a device that artificially re-creates aircraft flight and various aspects of the flight environment. This includes the equations that govern how aircraft fly, how they react to applications of their controls and other aircraft systems, and how they react to the external...
game. Another example of Maddox's work is his 2003 profile of Karl Wenclas
Karl Wenclas
Karl "King" Wenclas is a founder and the former Publicity Director and front man of the Underground Literary Alliance...
, leader of the Underground Literary Alliance
Underground Literary Alliance
The Underground Literary Alliance is a Philadelphia-based and internationally membered group of writers, zinesters and DIY writers. They seek to expose what they see as the corruption and insularity in the American book-publishing establishment while providing alternative avenues for writers who...
, titled "The Angriest Book Club in America" and published in the fashion magazine BlackBook
BlackBook Magazine
BlackBook is an American arts and culture magazine published 8x a year. Founded in 1996 as a quarterly publication, BlackBook has now expanded to a circulation of roughly 150,000. The magazine covers topics ranging from art, music, and literature to politics, popular culture, and travel guides....
. Wenclas later derided Maddox for distorting the Underground Literary Alliance in his BlackBook essay and summed up the article as "riddled with falsehoods".
In late 2003, Maddox began to contribute articles regularly to Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure is a travel magazine based in New York City, New York. Published 12 times a year, it has 4.8 million readers, according to its corporate media kit. It is put out by American Express Publishing Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Express Company led by...
. His first article in the magazine was called "The Concorde, R.I.P.", which chronicled his flight aboard the supersonic Concorde
Concorde
Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde was a turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner, a supersonic transport . It was a product of an Anglo-French government treaty, combining the manufacturing efforts of Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation...
airplane before it was decommissioned; it was later included in The Best Travel Writing 2005, the second volume of the annual Travelers’ Tales series. In 2004 Maddox began working as a contributing editor
Contributing editor
A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. The contributing editor regularly contributes articles to the publication but does not actually edit articles, and the title...
for the American edition of The Week
The Week
The Week, styled as THE WEEK, is a weekly news magazine.-History:It was founded in the United Kingdom by Jolyon Connell in 1995. In April 2001, the magazine began publishing an American edition; an Australian edition followed in October 2008. Dennis Publishing publishes the U.K. and Australian...
magazine and as of 2007 continues to contribute weekly to the print issue, handling sections including "Main Stories", "Talking Points", and "Only in America". He also reviewed several books for The New York Post in 2004 and 2005.
In 2006, Maddox began contributing a regular humor column called "Blinded by Science" to Discover magazine. His writing draws upon his childhood exposure to science; due to his father's career, his family was immersed in science and he was regularly exposed to scientists at social events. Maddox's first year's columns earned him a nod as a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Award
National Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards are a series of US awards that honor excellence in the magazine industry. They are administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City...
s' "Columns and Commentary" category.
Maddox's Discover columns are occasionally criticized; his essay "Fictional Reality", in particular, has been controversial. Maddox declared science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
obsolete in his essay "Fictional Reality" and was roundly criticized in the blogosphere
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
, most notably by Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
Michael Crichton
John Michael Crichton , best known as Michael Crichton, was an American best-selling author, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres. His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted...
's work as evidence. Minkel lambasted Maddox and pointed to author Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.Difficult to categorize, his novels have been variously referred to as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk...
's cutting-edge work as proof to the contrary, venturing that "science fiction writers can dictate the future if they have the vim and vision".
One of Maddox's most recent Discover essays, "The James Watson Affair", examines comments made by James Watson
James Watson
James Watson is the name of:*James Watson , British film and television actor*James Watson , United States Senator from New York...
in an article in London's Sunday Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
which led to Watson's suspension at the laboratory where he worked and his eventual retirement, and is skeptical of critics who found Watson's comment about black employees "not that big a deal" yet charged him with racism for his proposition on black African intelligence; in conclusion, Maddox derides the views held by several critics, stating that in comparison to Watson's statements, "the most ignorant and hurtful idea of all, of course, is that the entire topic of race and genes and intelligence is off-limits to all right-thinking, compassionate people, just on principle", which pejoratively assumes "that some races are innately and immutably much less intelligent than others". Maddox's essay, although published in the March 2008 printed edition of Discover, has not been published online.
Style
SatireSatire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
is evident in much of Maddox's work, from his years as editor-in-chief for Spy
Spy (magazine)
Spy was a satirical monthly magazine founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998...
magazine to his numerous articles in Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure is a travel magazine based in New York City, New York. Published 12 times a year, it has 4.8 million readers, according to its corporate media kit. It is put out by American Express Publishing Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Express Company led by...
, and his novel My Little Blue Dress. Maddox's satirical tendencies extend to his interviews and publicity materials. In one interview he made the preposterous claim that he once "spent 2 days being a personal assistant to a mafia boss in New York". Maddox's Penguin
Penguin Group
The Penguin Group is a trade book publisher, the largest in the world , having overtaken Random House in 2009. The Penguin Group is the name of the incorporated division of parent Pearson PLC that oversees these publishing operations...
biography skewers his own career, claiming he "elevated [Spy] to within spitting distance of its former glory, then accidentally bankrupted it after two short years", which led The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...
, his alma mater's student newspaper, to speculate that "Maddox himself had a hand in writing" it. Maddox's popular science
Popular science
Popular science, sometimes called literature of science, is interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is broad-ranging, often written by scientists as well as journalists, and is presented in many...
columns for Discover
Discover (magazine)
Discover is an American science magazine that publishes articles about science for a general audience. The monthly magazine was launched in October 1980 by Time Inc. It was sold to Family Media, the owners of Health, in 1987. Walt Disney Company bought the magazine when Family Media went out of...
magazine impart his own personal views on science with a markedly humorous and skeptical bent.
Selected bibliography
Harvard University ThesisThe Harvard Crimson
Novel
GEAR magazine
BlackBook magazine
- —. "The Angriest Book Club in America", BlackBookBlackBook MagazineBlackBook is an American arts and culture magazine published 8x a year. Founded in 1996 as a quarterly publication, BlackBook has now expanded to a circulation of roughly 150,000. The magazine covers topics ranging from art, music, and literature to politics, popular culture, and travel guides....
magazine, Fall 2003, no. 29, Protest Issue, p. 186 (also reprinted in the BlackBook anthologyAnthologyAn anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
The revolution will be accessorized).
Travel + Leisure magazine
Discover magazine
- "Blinded by Science" columns (not available online)
- Post-"Blinded by Science" article
GQ magazine