Bruno Maddox

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Bruno P. Maddox
Born1969
London, UK
OccupationNovelist
Journalist
Editor-in-chief
NationalityBritish
RelativesJohn Maddox, Father
Brenda Maddox, Mother
Bronwen Maddox, Sister[1]

Bruno Maddox (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist. He studied English literature at Harvard University, graduating with the class of 1992. Afterwards, Maddox worked various odd jobs until he secured work book reviewing for The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World.

After years of semi-employment, he found work at an IT company during the dot com boom which lasted for a spell of a year and a half. In early 1996, he talked his way into an editorship at SPY magazine and within a few short months became the editor-in-chief until the magazine shutdown in 1998.

Maddox's first novel My Little Blue Dress was released in 2001 to critical acclaim. It was a satire of the personal memoir. He went on to do book reviews for The New York Post while also writing articles for GEAR magazine. As of late, Maddox contributes satirical travel articles to Travel + Leisure magazine and has a monthly column called "Blinded by Science" at Discover magazine.

Early years

Maddox was born in 1969 in London where he was raised along with his sister Bronwen.[2] His parents are former Nature editor Sir John Maddox, a writer on science and nature, and Brenda Maddox, a biographer of both W.B. Yeats and Nora Barnacle.[3][4][5] Maddox was educated at Westminster School in London. Afterwards, he attended Harvard University in the United States where he studied English.[6] Maddox's first journalism piece was published in The Harvard Crimson in 1991 during his senior year.[7] He graduated with the Class of 1992.[6]

Upon graduation, Maddox went to Moscow where he worked as the English language editor of a Russian magazine for three short weeks during the Summer. Maddox later moved to New York City where he worked odd jobs such as hand delivering celebrity invitations to parties.[8] He soon became a book reviewer for The New York Times and The Washington Post and developed a reputation for writing scathing reviews which would later land him a job as an editor at SPY magazine. Maddox recalls that his "book reviewing style was pretty vicious," and explains that he "was a frustrated, twenty-something guy, sitting in his bedroom venting existential rage on these nasty academics."[9]

In 1995, after several years of semi employment, Maddox returned to New York City to seek employment. He got a job in an IT company during the dot com boom, and worked in the industry for a period of a year and a half.[8]

SPY magazine

While working in New York City, Maddox talked his way into an editorship at SPY magazine. SPY had briefly ceased publication in 1994 but soon after had a rebirth under new ownership by Sussex Publishers Inc. with the magazine's frequency reduced from ten to six issues a year.[10] Maddox was hired as a senior editor at SPY magazine in mid 1996.[9] SPY's new editorial team featured Maddox as senior editor along with satirist Adam Lehner as a deputy editor.[11] By December of 1996 Maddox was promoted to editor-in-chief.[9]

Maddox envisioned SPY as a national magazine instead of its legacy of covering heavily New York-centric stories. The idea was to reinterpret SPY because the "cheesy villains who anointed themselves as targets" in the 1980s were gone and the "sins of the '90s [were] those of a private, quiet cultivation of a sense of purity" which was harder to expose.[11] Maddox's editorial team included Jared Paul Stern as well as future screenwriter William Monahan in late 1997.[12][13]

In 1998, only two months after Sussex Publishers Inc. increased SPY's frequency from six to nine months a year in an effort to boost readership and ad pages, the satirical magazine was shut down. SPY's paid circulation had continued to drop and so the March issue of 1998 became the last. 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."[10] Maddox ceded that "a satirical magazine in New York in the late Nineties really had no function," because "everyone was being very modest and coy."[3]

My Little Blue Dress

File:My Little Blue Dress front cover.JPG
My Little Blue Dress, Maddox's first novel

Maddox sold the rights to his first novel to a publisher based on a five-page fax proposal he fired off on the advice of his literary agent John Brockman.[8] Brockman sold My Little Blue Dress in nine countries in a span of less than a week, without mailing any manuscript because the novel was nothing more than an idea at the time.[14]

It was a pretty terrifying experience, suddenly having a legal obligation to write an extremely difficult post-modern novel having never written anything before and also, stupidly, I told him I could do it in six months, which was just a conversational thing until it turned up in black and white in my contract. The six months came and went and my reputation in publishing at the moment is a reflection of the two and a half years I spent writing it longer than I should have done. The Dutch cancelled when the Millennium came and went, they decided it was a millennial book, but weirdly they would have accepted it in November of 1999, for a few days of millennial reading, they failed to see that it is obviously a twenty-first century book.

— Bruno Maddox, on the publishing of his first novel.[8]

My Little Blue Dress is a satire of the literary memoir. When My Little Blue Dress was first released, many book reviewers attempted to keep from spoiling the satirical nature of the novel, but some simply gave it away reasoning that it is self-evident and was the reason to read the novel in the first place.[15] Although the novel claims to be a memoir written by a 100-year-old woman, looking back on her life, it is in fact the desperate attempt of a fictional Bruno Maddox to forge a memoir in one night. The more pressing mystery of the novel is actually why the fictional Bruno Maddox is forging a memoir to begin with.[16]

Maddox drew some inspiration from the long-winded scenes in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho where Patrick Bateman would drone on endlessly about Phil Collins and restaurants and clothes and how to get blood off his carpets.[3]

In late 2001 Bruno Maddox went on a book tour accompanied by friend and former SPY editor William Monahan, who had recently released a paperback version of his first novel Light House, also published by a Penguin Putnam imprint. In 2004 Maddox indicated that he was working on a screen adaptation of his first novel at the end of his book reviews for The New York Post. No film was ever on a track for production and the script never materialized.[17]

Returning to freelance journalism

I don't like to think in terms of careers, I want to move from project to project ... I think like anything, it's good to keep changing. I just want to live with integrity.

— Bruno Maddox, on his lack of career path.[8]

After writing My Little Blue Dress 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," but nothing ever materialized.[18] He returned to freelance journalism and has written for various publications over the years. In 2003, Maddox did a profile of Karl Wenclas, leader of the Underground Literary Alliance, called "Literary Terrorism" for Black Book magazine.[19] Wenclas derided Maddox for distorting the Underground Literary Alliance in the article and summed it up as "riddled with falsehoods."[20]

Maddox wrote several pieces for GEAR magazine for a few years until the magazine shutdown in early 2003.[21][22][23] One particularly notable piece was called "Before It Was Real", a short essay published a year after 9/11, illuminating the callousness of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center through the experience of playing a flight simulator game.[24]

In 2006 Maddox started a column in Discover magazine called Blinded by Science. His first year's columns earned him a nod as a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Awards in the "Columns and Commentary" category.[25] Maddox's Blinded by Science columns routinely draw criticism from such diverse groups as Evolutionists for his "Stuck in Creationism" column on the hypocrisy of creationism to popular science contributors like Scientific American's J.R. Minkel for his "Fictional Reality" column on the languid state of Science fiction.[26][27][28]

Themes

Satire

Maddox is well known for satire, which is in evidence in his work as editor-in-chief for SPY magazine, as well as his numerous articles in Travel + Leisure magazine. His first novel My Little Blue Dress was a satire of the literary memoir, in which the memoir of a 100-year old woman is forged by the protagonist.

Maddox's satirical tendencies also extend into his interviews and publicity materials, where he has claimed he "spent 2 days being a personal assistant to a mafia boss in New York" and as his alma mater's student newspaper The Harvard Crimson points out his Penguin biography, which states he wrote his senior thesis on the "use of adjectives in restaurant menus", sounds as if "Maddox himself had a hand in writing" it.[8][6]

Science

Maddox was raised in a family entrenched in science due to his father's career as a science writer as well as editor of Nature magazine for twenty-two years. Despite his family's background in science, Maddox chose to study the humanities at Harvard University. In 2006 he began a monthly column at Discover magazine called "Blinded by Science" that dealt out his own personal views on science with a markedly humorous and skeptical bent.[4][29]

Selected bibliography

The Harvard Crimson

  • Bruno Maddox (1991-02-15). "Cabot Turns Trash Into Art: Superintendent Urges Residents on to Ecolympic Laurels". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25.

Novel

  • Maddox, Bruno (2001). My Little Blue Dress: A Novel. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0670884834.

GEAR magazine

Black Book magazine

  • Bruno Maddox. "Literary Terrorism", Black Book magazine, Fall 2003, no. 29, Protest Issue, p.186.[19]

Travel + Leisure magazine

  1. Bruno Maddox (October 2003). "The Concorde, R.I.P." Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  2. Bruno Maddox (March 2004). "Just Back from Barbados: John Edward, psychic". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  3. Bruno Maddox (August 2004). "Just Back From the Isle of Man: Stephen Fry". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  4. Bruno Maddox (December 2004). "A Grown-up's Christmas in Wales". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  5. Bruno Maddox (May 2005). "Smoke Across the Water". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  6. Bruno Maddox (August 2005). "Tangerine Dreams". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  7. Bruno Maddox (June 2006). "A Room of One's Own". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  8. Bruno Maddox (September 2006). "Rent Your Own Island". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  9. Bruno Maddox (June 2007). "The Suspicious Package". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-08-01.
  10. Bruno Maddox (August 2007). "Boomtown Bangalore". Travel + Leisure. Retrieved 2007-08-01.

Discover magazine

  1. Bruno Maddox (2006-04-27). "Blinded by Science: In praise of the bolder world of the first Internet". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  2. Bruno Maddox (2006-05-29). "Blinded By Science: What Were We Thinking?". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  3. Bruno Maddox (2006-06-25). "Blinded by Science: Nightmare of Divided Loyalties". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  4. Bruno Maddox (2006-07-12). "Blinded by Science: The Way of All Flesh". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  5. Bruno Maddox (2006-08-01). "Blinded by Science: The Last Days of Gossip". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  6. Bruno Maddox (2006-09-01). "Blinded by Science: Hawking's Exit Strategy". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  7. Bruno Maddox (2006-10-11). "Blinded by Science: Who's Freaky Now?". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  8. Bruno Maddox (2006-11-03). "Blinded by Science: Troubled in Twin Town". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  9. Bruno Maddox (2006-11-30). "Blinded by Science: Birding Brains". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  10. Bruno Maddox (2007-01-16). "Blinded by Science: The Real Reason We Can't Find bin Laden". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  11. Bruno Maddox (2007-02-12). "Blinded by Science: Stuck in Creationism". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  12. Bruno Maddox (2007-03-12). "Blinded by Science: The New Hypnosis". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  13. Bruno Maddox (2007-04-12). "Blinded by Science: Addicted to Beef". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-04-13.
  14. Bruno Maddox (2007-05-23). "Blinded by Science: IQ Is Dumb". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-05-24.
  15. Bruno Maddox (2007-06-01). "Blinded by Science: The Math Behind Beauty". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-06-04.
  16. Bruno Maddox (2007-06-21). "Blinded by Science: The Make-Believe Mars". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-06-24.
  17. Bruno Maddox (2007-07-20). "Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-07-21.

References

  1. ^ Lauren A.E. Schuker (2003-06-02). "'Late Starter' Writes On Telecommunications, Famous Women". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  2. ^ "About Bruno Maddox". Penguin Group (USA). Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  3. ^ a b c Nina Blount (2001). "my little blue dress: bruno maddox talks to ivenus about the post-post-postmodern novel". iVenus.com. Retrieved 2007-08-01.
  4. ^ a b "About Blinded By Science columns". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  5. ^ "Touching base". Nature. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  6. ^ a b c P. Patty Li (2001-05-04). "Reading. Period". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  7. ^ Bruno Maddox (1991-02-15). "Cabot Turns Trash Into Art: Superintendent Urges Residents on to Ecolympic Laurels". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  8. ^ a b c d e f Cristín Leach (2001-05-10). "Back in the (Day) Job - Bruno Maddox". Radio Telefís Éireann. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  9. ^ a b c Bob Andelman (1997-04-14). "Mr. Media Spies on Spy!". Universal Press Syndicate. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  10. ^ a b Neil Cassidy (1998-03-01). "Spy goes under for the last time". Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management. Retrieved 2007-04-15.
  11. ^ a b James Surowiecki (1997-09-02). "Media Circus: Spy vs. Spy". Salon.com. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  12. ^ Marc Santora (2006-04-09). "Reporter Was Quick Study in Art of Mingling With the Rich and Glamorous". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  13. ^ Sam Allis (2006-10-03). "Standing at the corner of Shakespeare and Scorsese". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2007-08-08. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. ^ Warren St. John (September 1999). "Agent Provocateur". Wired magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  15. ^ Michael Garry Smout (January–February 2002). "My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox: Viking, U.S., 2001". The Barcelona Review. Retrieved 2007-08-08.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
  16. ^ Brandon Robshaw (2001-06-02). "Books: A better shot at the Bloke's First Book". The Independent reprinted by FindArticles.com. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  17. ^ A note at the end of the book reviews reads "Bruno Maddox is adapting his novel "My Little Blue Dress" for the screen." See the New York Post book reviews from June 6, 2004 and June 27, 2004 on P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism and George Hagen's The Laments, respectively. They are archived here and here offshooting from ZoomInfo.com's profile.
  18. ^ Dart, Tom (June 02, 2001). "All About Me". The Times through LexisNexis® Academic. Retrieved on August 01, 2007.
  19. ^ a b "Diary: The ULA profiled". Gawker.com. 2003-08-01. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  20. ^ Karl Wenclas (2006-10-06). "Distorting the Message". AttackingtheDemi-Puppets (Wenclas' blog). Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  21. ^ Susan Kruglinski (2006-09-11). "DiscoBlog: Before it was Real (9/11)". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
  22. ^ Jeff Bercovici (2003-04-08). "Bob G. Jr. on what did in Gear". Media Life magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  23. ^ Jeff Bercovici (2004-04-01). "Gabbing With The Gooch". Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  24. ^ Bruno Maddox (September 2002). "Before It Was Real". GEAR magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
  25. ^ Diego Vasquez (2007-05-02). "New York is tops in magazine awards: Takes home five Ellies, the most of any magazine". Media Life magazine. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
  26. ^ Do-While Jones (February 2007). "A Tale of Two Museums". Evolution in the News. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  27. ^ JR Minkel (2007-08-08). "Science fiction is not obsolete--do you read me Bruno Maddox?". Scientific American. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  28. ^ Amos Kenigsberg (2007-08-09). "DiscoBlog: Sci-Fi Died... But It Came Back in a Different Form!". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
  29. ^ Lisa DeKeukelaere (June 2007). "Math Digest: Summaries of Media Coverage of Math". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
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