About the Author

Christopher Beha is a deputy editor at Harper's magazine. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, The Believer, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder and the memoir The Whole Five Feet. A New York City native, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

Reviews

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 hero plenty of heart in a novel that is both entertaining and thought provoking." - --Booklist
"A darkly witty tale." - Christianity Today