Christopher Beha delivers a cutting send-up of our cultural obsession with celebrity—a deliciously witty, and ultimately tender, novel about the absurdity of fame and the complexity of love sure to appeal to fans of Maria Semple and Jess Walter. A sharp-edged satire with heart, Arts & Entertainments is the story of Handsome Eddie Hartley who, at thirty-three, has forgone dreams of an acting career for the reality of life as a drama teacher at a boys’ prep school. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it is one disappointment too many. Weighted down with debt, his wife’s mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. Overcoming his initial moral qualms, Eddie figures that in an era when any publicity is good publicity, the tape won’t cause any harm—a decision that will have disastrous consequences and propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved. A hilariously biting and incisive take-down of our culture’s monstrous obsession with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man’s belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead. Praise for What Happened to Sophie Wilder : “What Happened to Sophie Wilder is about many things―the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism―but at its center its a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.” - New York Times Book Review “In this smart short novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha, a young writer deals with the reappearance and disappearance of the woman he sometimes loved.” - O, the Oprah Magazine “Christopher R. Beha’s beautiful, whip-smart first novel . . . is sober, unsentimental and delivered with intelligence and passion.” - Washington Post “Excitingly alert . . . to the ways we understand life in terms of stories, in particular the stories we tell about other people - whether to keep them at a safe distance or to bring them closer to us. More, it’s alert to our alertness of this. The story Beha tells about Charlie and Sophie is a convincing contemporary love story, not in spite of its sometimes dizzying self-awareness but, in large part, because of it.” - San Francisco Chronicle “A crisis of faith is key to the disappearance of a young woman in Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder (Tin House), which deftly renders the competing impulses―creative, intellectual, emotional―of young writers in New York.” - Vogue “Following on his impressive fiction debut, the somber What Happened to Sophie Wilder , Christopher Beha has pivoted away from that novel’s dark tone to create a wicked satire that’s every bit the equal of its predecessor in tackling serious moral issues.” - BookPage “...The storytelling is ingenious. Beha infuses the story with rich, potent irony, suggesting how susceptible we are to others’ plotting...Beha gets to have it both ways: His novel is at once brisk and episodic while critiquing the limits of brisk, episodic narrative.” - ―Kirkus Reviews “In this novel, being a star is like being trapped in a Kafka story. As Beha pushes Hartley through the bizarre mechanics of fame, he brings in everything from religion to social media. It’s a funny, sharp study of celebrity and all the strings that come with it. A-” - Entertainment Weekly “A smart, biting exploration of the tensions between reality and performance, pretending and believing, audience and self, Arts & Entertainments is also a thoughtful meditation on the fundamental human need to believe that somebody out there is watching.” - Kirkus Reviews “ Arts & Entertainments is indeed entertaining, but it’s also a thoughtful reflection on how we shape our own stories.” - Shelf Awareness, Starred Review “...a moving, discomfiting and at times painful satire on our reality-TV culture that had me cackling in recognition and cowering in shame.” - ―Adam Ross, bestselling author of Mr. Peanut “A funny novel about bad fame… [a] fast-moving satire by Christopher Beha about the semi-accidental creation of a contemporary two-bit celebrity: sex tape, social networks, and subsequent media circus.” - ―New York Magazine “A former actor’s sex tape rocks his world. Arts & Entertainments, by Christopher Beha, is a must” - ―Cosmopolitan “Hilarious.” - ―Huffington Post “Arts and Entertainments is a 21st-century Faust written in the style of Muriel Spark.” - ―Books & Culture “The ingenious way he plots to get back into his wife’s good graces provides lots of laughs in this very clever takedown of celebrity culture. Beha, deputy editor at Harper’s magazine, also gives his hapless her