LUCKY BREAK, by Esther Freud. Bloomsbury; 320 pages; $16.

At first, I thought Esther Freud had written the wrong novel.

Lucky Break is the story of a group of aspiring actors who all meet at a borderline ridiculous school of dramatic art in London, run by a camp pair of queens.

Freud carefully sketches in her people, all more or less familiar types if you’ve ever been an aspiring actor – the one who auditions brilliantly but never gets any better; the one who glows with radiant sexuality which many mistake for talent; the slightly awkward one who can’t get out of her own way and is looking to escape her own personality into more appealing alternatives.

Dan is the serious grind, Jemma is the girl he falls in love with, Charlie is the stunner, Nell is the apologetic, awkward one.

With the stage set, Freud makes a quick leap into the kids post-graduation careers, and it was at this point that I thought she’d jumped the rails. The set-up had led me to think the book would be a more sophisticated version of Glee, with the twists and turns of post-adolescence and halting maturity carefully delineated.

But my fears were unrealized; Freud didn’t lose the thread of her book, which succeeds as a sweet, slightly comic, ultimately moving, and quite realistic portrayal of the travails of a largely thankless profession.

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Cecil Beaton: The New York Years, (Skira/Rizzoli) casts a wide net, and includes everything from advertising work to his photographs of his designs for My Fair Lady to his sets for the New York City Ballet to the portraits he took of Greta Garbo during their supposed affair.

The book is the catalogue for an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York that’s closing next month, and it proves that Beaton could make the ordinary attractive, and the attractive ravishing.

He was an elegant dandy, and then some – the book features at least one shot of him in effective drag – and he brought his sensibility to whatever he shot.

There are still people who shoot in Beaton’s highly theatrical style, but there is almost always a tinge of irony applied. Beaton didn’t do irony; he believed wholeheartedly in what he was designing and photographing, every bit as much as, say, Walker Evans believed in his own work. That Beaton made a lot more money than Walker Evans is because he was in perfect sync with the theater of Binkie Beaumont and the publishing of Condé Nast – the cultural arbiters of his time.

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Billy Ray Cyrus

Billy Ray Cyrus is the latest celebrity to sign up with Amazon.com

The singer of “Achy Breaky Heart” and father and former co-star of Miley Cyrus has a memoir, “Hillbilly Heart,” coming in spring 2013.

Amazon.com, which has been aggressively expanding its publishing operation, announced Thursday that Cyrus would discuss with “great candor” everything from his early years to life as the parent of a teen superstar. Cyrus and his daughter starred together in the hit TV series “Hannah Montana.”

Others with Amazon deals include actress-director Penny Marshall and actor James Franco. Those books, however, will not be available everywhere. Barnes & Noble Inc. announced earlier this week that it would not stock releases from its rival retailer.

Author Beth Raymer at the Blue Planet Writers' Room in Northwood. (Bruce R. Bennett / Palm Beach Post)

It was a surreal moment for Beth Raymer.

There before her was her old office — well, not really her office, but its exact re-creation, from the desk to the lighting to the chairs.

"The difference," she recalls, "is that Catherine Zeta-Jones was sitting in one of the chairs."

The Chicago star wasn’t one of Raymer’s real-life co-workers, and neither were Bruce Willis and Vince Vaughn. But the details of Raymer’s real life, a journey that began in her hometown of Wellington, are so surrealistic that they practically demanded to be written into a book and a Hollywood movie.

And now they have.

Raymer’s life in the unpredictable world of bookies and offshore gambling provided the background for her memoir, Lay the Favorite, and a new movie of that same name starring Zeta-Jones, Willis, Vaughn and British actress Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as Raymer.

The film, directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters, High Fidelity, The Queen), premiered this month at the Sundance Film Festival, where reactions among critics was mixed, and does not have a general release date yet.

Raymer, 35, is temporarily back in Palm Beach County to research her next book, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl who moves from the Ohio Valley to the wilds of Loxahatchee.

She will appear Friday for a reading of Lay the Favorite at Harold’s Coffee Lounge in West Palm Beach’s Northwood Village, to benefit the Blue Planet Writers’ Room.

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There is none of the dour, melancholy Edward Hopper in Edward Hopper’s Maine (Prestel). These are paintings done between 1914 and 1929, before the depression – Hopper’s, not the world’s – set in, and they’re among the most brilliantly lyrical landscapes of their period. Even the style is slightly different, with slashing, almost abrupt brush and knifework and much heavier impasto than the more studied, controlled work of the ’30s and ’40s.

Maine has a particular confluence of places – an often violent sea, very rocky shores, picturesque lighthouses, bright but not oppressive light. Near the end of his life, Hopper said that he found Cape Cod "soft," so by inference there must have been something about Maine’s elemental starkness that appealed to him.

All of that is on view in this book which marks an exhibition of Hopper’s Maine paintings at, appropriately, Bowdoin College in Brunswick, although many of the paintings are drawn from the holdings at the Whitney and some private collections.

A beautiful, focused book about a great artist.

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Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Wright will read his works on Wednesday. (Photo by Dan Addison)

The eighth annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival returns to Old School Square in Delray Beach Monday through Jan. 21.

This year, the 11 award-winning poets who will be featured are Kim Addonizio, Cornelius Eady, Claudia Emerson, Vanessa Hidary, David Kirby, Thomas Lux, Jamaal May, Gregory Orr, Chase Twichell, Eleanor Wilner and special guest poet Charles Wright.

Directions, invite a friend, nearby dining

Eight are faculty poets and two are performance poets. There are 11 ticketed public events planned, including readings, talks and a lively panel discussion. Workshop participants will read at three late-night open mikes, which are free to the public. Miles Coon, director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, said the six-day festival is a great learning opportunity for both fledging and accomplished poets, but it’s also a place non-poets can hear works performed by powerful voices.

"I’m particularly proud that Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, will be our special guest poet," Coon said. "He will read his work at the Gala Reading on Wednesday, following the festival gala."

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Author and Wellington resident Tami Hoag. (Alyssa Orr / Palm Beach Post)

Tami Hoag prefers to be alone. In fact, she needs to be alone.

"I like the solitary life of a writer," the bestselling suspense author says. "I enjoy my time with my friends, but it’s draining for me to be with people. Some people gain energy from being with people but I’m not like that. I need alone time."

Good luck with that over the next few months. That’s because Tami Hoag is more than a writer – she has a second career as an equestrian rider in Wellington every winter.

Her sport is the Olympic discipline of dressage, which people think of as "dancing for horses."

"It’s definitely a sport for perfectionists. And you get to wear a cool outfit," she laughs.

She has three horses here for the winter Grand Prix circuit and will be riding two of them in competition. Her ultimate goal is a shot at the Olympic trials later this year.

Meanwhile, Hoag is also busy at her other job – selling more than 38 million books, with titles like Secrets to the Grave, Dark Horse and Deeper Than the Dead. Hoag has been praised by readers for her ability to merge jet-fueled suspense with the nitty-gritty details of police investigative work ("I love cops. I find them fascinating").

Her latest, Down the Darkest Road, was released late last month. It’s the third in a series about the residents of Oak Knoll, Calif., and their dirty secrets, set in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Cecil Beaton had a gift for gentility. In his costumes for My Fair Lady, in his photographs, in his diaries, he’s looking for a combination of elegance and style that’s hard to find except in photographs and designs by Cecil Beaton.

Queen Elizabeth II: Portraits by Cecil Beaton has been published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in anticipation of Elizabeth’s 60th year on the throne.

Beaton was more than a photographer; he was a friend of the family. The book includes a pastoral Beaton photograph of Elizabeth’s mother in the style of Gainsborough that was taken in 1940, just as the German bombs were falling in the East End.

Beaton first photographed Elizabeth in 1942, when she was 16 and – there’s no other word for it – rather luscious. She obviously understood that on some level he could draw things out of her that weren’t ordinarily seen, so he became her unofficial court photographer. Mostly, he could get her to relax.

The book includes Beaton’s famous coronation portrait, dozens of other sittings of Elizabeth, some with her newborn children, all the way up until the final sitting in 1968, when she’s enshrouded by a long cape that emphasizes that she is indeed Her Majesty, with the hauteur of middle age.

There are also some other shots relating to the royal family – some fascinating shots of George VI and his wife amidst the bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace, among others.

It’s a book embodying a large piece of 20th century history.

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Image by alvherre via Flickr

Can you help make Stephen Hawking’s voice heard?

The famed British physicist is seeking an assistant to help develop and maintain the electronic speech system that allows him to communicate his vision of the universe. An informal job ad posted to the famed physicist’s website said the assistant should be computer literate, ready to travel, and able to repair electronic devices “with no instruction manual or technical support.”

Hawking has long struggled against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease which left him almost completely paralyzed.

He lost his real voice in a tracheotomy in 1985, but a wheelchair-mounted computer helps synthesize speech by interpreting the twitches of his face. The synthesizer’s robotic monotone has become nearly as famous as Hawking himself, but the computer — powered by batteries fastened to the back of Hawking’s wheelchair — isn’t just for speaking.

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Wolcott Gibbs was a brilliant parodist, a good reporter, a ghastly theater and film critic. He was also a depressive and a devout alcoholic. In other words, he fit right in at The New Yorker.

Bloomsbury’s new anthology Backward Ran Sentences is an invaluable collection of Gibbs’ best – as well as some of his worst – work at the magazine, where he was a staff writer from 1927 until his possibly self-inflicted death in 1958.

Gibbs’ death made the front page of The New York Times, but since then his posthumous reputation has depended on frequent reprintings of his devastating take-down of Henry Luce and Time, from which this anthology takes its title.

Thomas Vinciguerra, who is working on a biography of Gibbs, has edited the anthology as a sampler of his subject’s work in journalism. Since Gibbs’ talents were so variable, and his intake of booze so comprehensive – he seems to have developed a minor specialty in showing up drunk on opening nights – the results are all over the place, but Gibbs’ best work as a satirist has a sardonic exactitude and tone that is breathtaking.

This anthology a real contribution to the history of journalism.

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