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Best selling author and journalist Jesse Kornbluth
and his beautiful wife and chef extraordinaire
Karen Collins
opened their Carnegie Hill apartment for a festive holiday
party to celebrate the release of Jesse's latest book,
"The New Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol", the
holiday classic, gently abridged for today's readers. Jesse
also unveiled the brilliant illustrations for the book
created by his longtime friend acclaimed artist Paige
Peterson.
Just in time for the season, Head Butler released the
new version of the timeless holiday classic, in e-book form
edited by Kornbluth with 22 brilliant illustrations
by .Paige Peterson. As Paige is a cancer survivor,
a portion of the proceeds will go to the Huntsman Cancer
Institute
At the party Mr. Kornbluth, shared his reason for
undertaking the project. Remembering with great fondness
the annual reading of the holiday tale at his boarding
school, he attempted to share that same warm feeling with
his young daughter Helen age 8. But much to
his chagrin, after five minutes the little girl said, �I�m
bored�.
Kornbluth chose not to blame her near-total boredom with the
saga of Ebenezer Scrooge on the much talked about short
attention span of children in this age of computer games,
texting and instant gratification in an overly permissive
culture. Instead he set about on a journey to bring Dickens�
story into the 21st century � not by re-writing
it but by updating the archaic prose, trimming the dialogue,
cutting the extraneous characters and reducing the 28,000
words to their essence. The end result is a book half the
length but coupled with Ms. Peterson�s illustrations still
shows both the darkness and the light of the original
morality tale.
As Kornbluth noted and many early readers agree, the new
�gently abridged� version conveys �the feeling of
London in 1843 without the formal
diction and Victorian heaviness � it means to be a story
that adults can read to their captivated kids right to the
end, and that kids, starting with my daughter, can read by
themselves with pleasure�.
The end result
for all is an immensely readable story, much the length that
Dickens himself read in 127 public readings he himself
performed using an abridged version. Mr. Kornbluth turned to
his longtime friend artist
Paige
Peterson
to create the images that would capture perfectly the
period. Says Kornbluth, "Over
the years, as I�d looked at Paige Peterson's work, I was
amazed. Her styles changed --- radically. The only common
thread was excellence. So when I asked her to do the
illustrations for 'A Christmas Carol' --- the first Head
Butler e-book--- I gave her no directions. And that paid
off, big time." Due to the high cost of printing at
the time, the original version only had 8 illustrations, 4
black and white and 4 hand-colored plates. With the freedom
of the e-book, Ms. Peterson was able to create 22 powerful
images that ring true to the era and capture the bleakness
and often despair that was a sign of the times.
I n
approaching the task of the drawings, Peterson says.�
I wanted the illustrations to be macabre. Dark - stark
scary- mysterious -Victorian. Many children worked 16 hours
a day. It was cold. It was bleak. Life was harsh and hard.
There was always hunger. Scrooge was angry � hostile �
revengeful - thin lipped. Mean old man. He had no joy. Or
love in his heart. He was angry. Void of empathy or
compassion. I wanted you to see that in his face I wanted
you to feel the horrid afterlife of Marley I went to the
library and brought every illustrated Dickens book I could
find to a table and took in the images. I then while still
at the library took my pen to paper. I began drawing. They
were rough sketches; I went home and used my watercolor
paints to give texture and depth. I wanted them to be raw
and simple and not particularly obvious. In the end, the
light of awareness bursts forth in color�.
Among those toasting Kornbluth
and Peterson were:
Christina Haag,
Priscilla Rattazzi, Howard Kaminsky, Madeleine Morel, Alan
Hruska, Dan Hedaya, Lauren Cerand, Dominique Browning,
Charles Moss and Susan Calhoun Moss, Jane Friedman, Julie
Iovine, John Loeffler, Nancy Silverman, Susan Lehman,
Till Schnurrman,
Ginger Brown, Ann Gallagher, Susan Stein, Gretl Claggett,
Charles Warner, Julia Bradford, Joan Schenkar, Jan Barker,
Anki Leeds, Sarah Sym Rosenthal, Suzanne O'Malley Greenberg,
David Patrick Columbia,
and quite a few
others.
The E-book is available in
Kindle at www.Amazon.com
or at Barnes & Noble in Nook for only $2.99. To buy the Nook
download of �A Christmas Carol� for $2.99,
click here.
To buy the Kindle
download of �A Christmas Carol� for $2.99,
click here.
As Ms. Peterson is a multiple cancer survivor and activist,
a portion of sales will go to the
Huntsman Cancer
Institute.
About the
Creators
JESSE KORNBLUTH
As a magazine journalist, Jesse Kornbluth has been a
contributing editor for Vanity Fair,
New York,
Architectural Digest, Reader�s Digest, The Los Angeles Times
Magazine and Departures, and a contributor to The New
Yorker, The New York Times, etc. As an author, his books
include Airborne: The Triumph and Struggle of Michael
Jordan; Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of
Michael Milken; Pre-Pop Warhol; Notes from the New
Underground and The Other Guy Blinked (with Roger
Enrico). Most recently, he helped Twyla Tharp on The
Collaborative Habit.
On the Web, he co-founded Bookreporter.com, now the hub of the
Internet�s most successful non-commercial book network. From
1997 to 2002, he was Editorial Director of America Online.
In 2004, he launched HeadButler.com,
a cultural concierge.
PAIGE PETERSON
California
born Paige Matthews Peterson is an American painter
and illustrator specializing in acrylic landscapes,
portraits, and figural images. She is the former
daughter-in-law of billionaire and former US Secretary of
Commerce
Peter George Peterson.
She now lives and works in
New York City and
East Hampton,
Long Island. Peterson's
work has been characterized as "lyrical" by the Philadelphia
Inquirer[
and "spare but evocative" by the San Francisco Chronicle
Peterson has been exhibited regularly in galleries from
California to Maine (where, in 2004, her paintings appeared
in a group show that also featured works by
Christo,
Chuck Close, and
Alex Katz).
In 2002, Paige Peterson was featured in Studios by the Sea,
a photographic account, by
Bob Colacello and
Jonathan Becker, of artists working and living on Long
Island's East End, and, a year later, she was
selected for lifetime membership in the Guild Hall Academy
of the Arts. In 2006, she co-authored and
illustrated the children's book
Blackie, The Horse Who Stood
Still, which is in its fifth printing
from Welcome Books in
New York City. In July
2008 her work was featured in a one-woman show at the
Spanierman Gallery in
East Hampton, New York. In March 2011 Paige had
a show at the Gerald
Peters Gallery in New York City. The show was curated by Peter
Marcelle. Christopher Cerf and Paige Peterson have a new
children's book "Skidboot the Dog" coming out in Spring
2012. An advocate for cancer research, she is
a Senior Vice President of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation
and speaks around the country on The Power of Attitudinal
Healing through the Huntsman Cancer Institute and
Attitudinal Healing International. She is
also the Vice President of Special Projects for Welcome
Books, where she has an imprint, Cerf & Peterson.
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