Charles Arrowsmith | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: Charles Arrowsmith

Seriously Questioning… Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds is the New York Times bestselling author of the Coretta Scott King Honor book, The Boy in The Black Suit, and co-author of All American Boys with Brendan Kiely, also a Coretta Scott King Honor book, as well as the inaugural recipient of the Walter Dean Myers Award. Aside from his young adult works, Reynolds is also the author of the middle-grade novels As Brave As You, which won the Kirkus Prize and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and GHOST, the first of the four-book TRACK series, which was selected as a National Book Award Finalist. On May 10, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, All Together Now, alongside Elif Batuman, John A. Farrell, and Annabelle Gurwitch (tickets). We spoke to Jason ahead of the show. Name: Jason Reynolds. Age: 33. Where are you from? Washington, DC. What is your occupation? Writer. Title of most recent work: GHOST. What are you working on now? Miles Morales (black spider-man), and the sequel to GHOST, and a bunch of other stuff. If you had to paint a scene from your childhood to capture its essence, what would you paint? Black children, outside. Old men with cigarettes. Old ladies, drinking. Everybody dressed to the nines. What’s […]

Seriously Questioning… Annabelle Gurwitch

Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of the fabulous new collection, Wherever You Go, There They Are: Stories About My Family You May Relate To (Blue Rider Press, 2017); I See You Made an Effort (a New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist — read our review); You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up (coauthored with Jeff Kahn), and Fired! (also a Showtime Comedy Special). Gurwitch gained a loyal following during her stint co-hosting Dinner and a Movie on TBS, years as a regular commentator on NPR, and her many acting roles. She’s written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Hollywood Reporter. Meghan Daum has called her “the secret love child of Nora Ephron and Groucho Marx… an old-fashioned wit for the post-modern age”. At House of SpeakEasy, we know her of old, for she spoke at our November 2015 show, Happy Now? On May 10, she returns to the SpeakEasy fold, in our Seriously Entertaining show, All Together Now, alongside Elif Batuman, John A. Farrell, and Jason Reynolds (tickets). We spoke to Annabelle ahead of the show. Name: Annabelle Gurwitch. Title of most recent work: Wherever You Go, There They Are. What are you working on now? I’m […]

Seriously Questioning… Tony Tulathimutte

Last year Tony Tulathimutte published his first novel, Private Citizens (William Morrow, 2016), to admiring notices from New York Magazine, which called it “a Great American Novel“, and Jonathan Franzen, who labeled Tulathimutte “a big talent“. Last week he won the Whiting Award for Fiction. Next week he will join our Seriously Entertaining line-up at Joe’s Pub for The End My Friend, alongside Ana Marie Cox, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Travon Free (tickets). We’re excited. Come. What’s the big deal? Private Citizens is, as Franzen suggests, “a real book”. Tulathimutte, like Franzen, is haunted by difficulty. The difficulty of behaving ethically in a world where the cards are stacked against you. The difficulty of emotional connection between intellects capable of second-, third-, fourth-guessing each other. Many times during Private Citizens I thought of the “Gary” section in The Corrections, a brilliantly sustained cadenza of rising panic in which Franzen’s Gary slowly collapses under the combined pressures of family, career, and hyperreality. So too do Tulathimutte’s protagonists — social warriors, entrepreneurs, tech mavens; hot messes and intellectuals all — find themselves hemmed in by a culture that is changing faster than human emotion can keep up. The novel is set, appropriately, in 2008, a […]

Seriously Questioning… Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy’s witty, moving, fiery new collection, So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), takes us into the past. In its longest poem, “Is There Something I Should Know?”, Shaughnessy remembers a world of Simple Minds and Duran Duran songs, where she finds a young woman haunted by the changes in her body, caught in “pubescence’s acrid synthesis”, betrayed by her own functions and the silence of others (“No one discussed it or acknowledged it / even though we ALL READ THE JUDY BLUME”). Shaughnessy’s previous work includes Our Andromeda (2012), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, The International Griffin Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, O Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Brenda Shaughnessy will appear alongside Tony Tulathimutte, Travon Free, and Ana Marie Cox at our next Seriously Entertaining show, The End My Friend, at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on April 6. Buy tickets here. Name: Brenda Shaughnessy. Where are you from? Born in Okinawa, Japan. Raised in Southern California. What is your occupation? Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Title of most recent work: So Much Synth. What are you working on now? Mentoring our future poets. If […]

Seriously Questioning… Travon Free

Travon Free was a Division I college basketball player before he became a stand-up comedian, comedy writer and actor. He has written for The Daily Show, for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 2015, and recently for HBO’s Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons. Currently, he co-hosts The Room Where It’s Happening: A Hamilton Fan Podcast and writes for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. We spoke to Travon ahead of his appearance at our Seriously Entertaining show The End My Friend at Joe’s Pub on April 6, 2017, alongside Ana Marie Cox, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Tony Tulathimutte. Name: Travon Free. Age: 31. Where are you from? Compton, CA. What is your occupation? Writer/comedian/actor. What are you working on right now? Writer: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Which day in your life would you repeat? The day I won an Emmy. Which day would you delete? The day Donald Trump was elected. For obvious reasons. What do you most look forward to? Breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then putting my work into the world and seeing how it affects people’s lives. What do you hope future civilizations will find in the miraculously preserved shell of your apartment? My […]

Seriously Questioning… Mitchell S. Jackson

The recipient of a Whiting Award in 2016, Mitchell S. Jackson has a bright future. When Roxane Gay reviewed The Residue Years, his 2013 debut novel (or “novel“, as the cover has it; it’s also sort of a memoir), she picked out its language, “flying off the page with percussive energy“, its “warmth and wit”, “a hard-won wisdom”. Set in a Portland that predates the advent of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, it tells the story of Champ and his mother, Grace; also of crack, prison, and black life in a Northwest Portland free of the hipsterism and postmodern irony with which many readers will be more familiar. Jackson is from Portland and has himself spent time in prison, where he discovered both a love and a major talent for writing (he discusses this transformative experience here). He now serves on the faculty of NYU and Columbia and has become an in-demand speaker, taking a leaf out of his hero James Baldwin’s book and asking “Should ‘blackness’ exist?” in a powerful talk at TED2016. We spoke to Mitchell ahead of his appearance at our next Seriously Entertaining show, Failing Up, on February 7 at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater. Name: Mitchell Jackson. Age: I’m 41. Where are you from? I’m […]

Seriously Questioning… Idra Novey

To translate is not just to render in a different language but (done well) to ventriloquize the soul of another. It is to understand undercurrents transcendently, better to realize meaning. Translation isn’t just Babel fishing; it’s screen printing, recreation, midwifery. Idra Novey, the Brooklyn-based novelist and poet who’s translated Clarice Lispector, Paulo Henriques Britto, and Lascano Tegui, last year made the translation-metaphor into a witty, fast-paced debut novel called Ways To Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016; newly in paperback). At its outset, Beatriz Yagoda, one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, disappears up a tree. Thousands of miles away, her English translator, Emma, hears of her strange vanishing and takes the first flight to Rio to get to the bottom of things. But how well does anyone really know her? Yagoda’s daughter, for one, holds no truck with “the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels”. For Emma, though, who used her direct experience and memories of the author “to illuminate the strange, dark boats of Beatriz’s images as she ferried them into English”, there seems to be at least a degree of metaphysical understanding. “For translation to be an art,” Yagoda once told her, “you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an […]

Space Oddity

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space Janna Levin Knopf, 2016; 256pp The romance of the cosmos is the subject of Black Hole Blues. The romance of bodies of unimaginable size colliding and merging darkly and silently in space. Romance, yes — but also the knotty bureaucracy that has hampered and enabled scientists for the last five decades as they’ve grappled with one of astrophysics’ most notorious what-ifs. Might we ever hear a gravitational wave? If you’ve never even heard of a gravitational wave, then Janna Levin is here to help. Part oral history, part popular science, her brilliant book’s 250 pages shuttle by at a pace untypical of physics writing (if, that is, you’re usually bamboozled by quarks and bendy spacetime). Her friendly, NPRish tone and good eye for novelistic detail help the unschooled reader through some of physics’ most abstruse concepts. But it’s not just a light touch that leavens Levin’s writing. Her decision to focus on the more mundane forces that govern science’s arduous progress — the bureaucracy, the funding bids, the internecine squabbling — this is what gives Black Hole Blues heart where one might expect vacuum. The chilliness of space is tempered by fiery human passion. “As much as this book is a chronicle of gravitational waves,” writes Levin, […]

Review: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

The Sellout Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus and Giroux (hardcover) / Picador (paperback), 2015; 304pp Entering the world like the bastard love-child of a Chris Rock routine and a Thomas Pynchon novel, The Sellout is a sensational satire on race relations in the United States. Its outrageous plot, which reintroduces segregation to a forgotten ghetto in Los Angeles County, motors along in the background of a series of brilliant set-pieces fueled by taboo-busting invective. Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize triumph last month (he’s the first American author thus honored) is a richly deserved boost to the book, which will hopefully find a wide readership in the years to come as a consequence of the win. And reaching readers feels urgent: the protagonist’s contrarian position on political correctness and establishment thinking about “black America’s problems”, which leads him down a legal rabbit-hole that ends at the Supreme Court, lays the ground for a spookily timely jolt to liberal thought. Ends and means may not always line up; what seem like blasphemous methods may advance a just cause much further. How should we proceed when so little has been achieved going about things the so-called right way? Offering an answer, or at least provocatively worrying away at the question, is the submerged serious intent of Beatty’s […]

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