Capote

NEW YORK —  Molly Ringwald has a long-standing connection to Truman Capote: When she was about 3 years old, she appeared onstage in “The Grass Harp.” Her character was referred to as Fig Newton — although she doesn’t think that was in the script — and she didn’t have any lines.Still, it sparked an awareness of the writer at an early age and his powerful mystique. “It was one of those things where I was always interested in Truman Capote because I’ve known about him for so long,” she says.Five decades later, Ringwald has…

Tom Hollander didn’t get into showbiz to play himself. He played a bumbling MP in In the Loop, and a scheming socialite in The White Lotus. Most recently, he played the treasured author Truman Capote in FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, who slithers his way into high society New York, becoming a highly requested guest at dinner parties and resort getaways — only to have it all turn sour.  With the Hollywood magic stripped away, Hollander lives a reserved lifestyle. His home sits in the rural English countryside east…

A writer’s explosive, tell-all article ostracizes him from his posh female friends to the very end. An Irishman in the Outback recovers from a wild car accident but has no idea why so many people are after him. Those are the scenarios of two different series that are worth checking out this week, along with an animated gem that takes place in San Francisco. Here’s our roundup. “FEUD: Capote Vs. The Swans”: What’s astonishing about the remarkable second installment in Ryan Murphy’s “FEUD” series re-creating infamous…

Truman Capote wanted to title the book he was working on until his death, Answered Prayers — as in: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones” — and the trailer for the miniseries Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans shows just how true that is. The series, which premieres on FX and Hulu at 10 p.m. on Jan. 31, will trace how Capote, played by Tom Hollander, became a social pariah by writing about his New York socialite friends in the few chapters of Answered Prayers that actually made it into the public.…

The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece. He envisaged it as his response to Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, but squeezed into a single volume and set mostly in postwar New York city.The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee…

The opening words are not quite there, but the essence Truman Capote is striving for already soars from the page as he conjures up the vision of a small community in the heartlands of America where terrible events are soon to unfold.“Holcomb is a very visible village,” the passage begins, captured in the author’s tight, almost crabby handwriting, “located on high wheat plains of western Kansas, where the air is Swiss-clear and the flat views lonesomely, awesomely extensive.”Millions of devotees of the book that emerged…

Illustration: Grandfailure (Dreamstime)io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done” by Scott Edelman. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s website. Enjoy!A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My…