Charles Arrowsmith | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: Charles Arrowsmith

ReadEasy, 15 May 2015

ReadEasy: a literary submarine cruising the depths of the internet. This week: writers recommend writers. That’s nice. Read on for top tips for #FridayReads et al from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Margaret Attwood, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Sedaris. (Pause to get a coffee. This is not part of the found object. :] ) NB the gold standard for #TwitterFiction is Jennifer Egan's "Black Box."— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 13, 2015 …written during the Twitter Fiction Festival. Very well, Margaret: here is Jennifer Egan‘s “Black Box“. Knausgaard recommends… Holly Hunter, Brandon J. Dirden and Corey Stoll were the readers at Symphony Space’s packed-out “Evening with Karl Ove Knausgaard” last Wednesday, which also featured an interview with the man himself, nimbly, wittily conducted by Hari Kunzru. “I wanted to be a writer for almost all the wrong reasons,” the great Norwegian confessed to Kunzru; “I had failed as a rock musician.” Rock music’s loss was literature’s gain — Zadie Smith has compared Knausgaard to crack, and others are just as ecstatic. All this despite the critical near-consensus (bordering on cliché) that his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (published in hardback by Archipelago Books and in paperback by FSG) is in many ways quite banal. […]

One Simple Rule

After hearing from our six guest writers in April on the subject “One Simple Rule”, you might think we’d have some pretty solid advice for you. We don’t. Write what you know? Well, sometimes it’s best not to. Everyone should know CPR? Granted; hard to argue. Back up your work? Phew, yes, we’d all have saved ourselves some stress by following that one. Break all of the rules, always? We don’t like to be too prescriptive here… Well, we’ll leave you to judge, as you enjoy the wit and wisdom of Elif Shafak, Tom Rob Smith, Amber Tamblyn, Lisa Robinson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Beau Willimon. Elif Shafak was first up to the mic. An industrious author, Shafak has published several novels, numerous articles, and a collection of nonfiction. She’s a TED Talker. She’s Turkey’s most widely read female writer. She’s perplexed, then, by what she perceives to be a cult of idleness among many Middle Eastern men. “All across the Middle East, if you travel,” she said, “you will come across thousands and thousands of men — and always men — just sitting, playing backgammon, chatting — smoking, mostly — until it’s time to go home.” These men are not the subjects of her work, though. “What I’m interested in […]

Sheep-dipping, singing, and feminism with Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts

On April 21, our co-founder Amanda Foreman interviewed Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts about their roles in Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd at New York’s La Grenouille. Below is a transcript of their talk. Amanda Foreman: I think the reason why we love the nineteenth-century novelists — the Brontës, the Dickenses, the Hardys, the George Eliots of this world — is because they both give us these traditional truths about humanity, and yet they also dissect them, they eviscerate them. The premise of Far From the Madding Crowd is very simple. It’s about love, it’s about betrayal, and it’s about money. These are eternal concepts. They revolve around a young woman named Bathsheba Everdene, who is a young country girl who suddenly comes into a great deal of money. With that independence comes not the freedom she thought she was going to have, because she is surrounded by three male antagonist-protagonists. And it’s her visceral struggle for independence vis-à-vis these three men. Because it’s about Bathsheba, I’m going to start with Carey Mulligan, who plays Bathsheba. I must say, you’re currently also playing a role in David Hare’s Skylight, about a woman who refuses to be defined by the men […]

Review: The Marauders, by Tom Cooper

The Marauders by Tom Cooper Crown, 2015; 320pp “Of course he knew that searching for an island of marijuana was crazy. But he also knew that every so often fools stumbled upon fortune, whether by fate or fluke.” This is Cosgrove, one of the gallery of scofflaws and no-hopers that fill out Tom Cooper‘s cracking debut novel, The Marauders. A thriller set in Jeanette, La., in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, The Marauders channel-hops between twin drug dealers, a one-armed shrimper, a teenage boy and his bitter father, a drifter and his criminal buddy, and a BP middleman sent to settle claims to the oil company’s advantage. All the while, its helter-skelter plot unfolds. The teeming swamps of Barataria Bay are a constant mysterious presence, and it’s here that Cosgrove and Hanson, who met on a community-service program, go hunting for the Toup brothers’ legendary marijuana island. It’s also where Lindquist, who pops painkillers from a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, roves with his metal detector, hoping to turn up pirate gold, or, failing that, jewelry lost in the floods of Katrina. Cooper’s sense of place is masterful, reflecting both the stoicism of the Barataria’s inhabitants and the precariousness of their way […]

Building a House of Cards: An Interview with Beau Willimon

“Event television” has been replaced by a new phenomenon in recent years, and that’s in no small part thanks to Beau Willimon. On February 1, 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of a show Willimon had (loosely) adapted from a BBC series from 1990, itself a translation of a political thriller published the year before. Gone, though, was Ian Richardson’s uppity Chief Whip, his lapine poise and aristocratic camp. Gone were the Whitehall setting and the early-’90s sexual mores. In their place, the cool, adult style of David Fincher; the Jacobean viciousness of politics inside the Beltway; the Southern camp of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood. The show was House of Cards; the rest, as they say… Beau Willimon very kindly agreed to answer your questions. So with many thanks to our readers for sending them in, please find below his (declassified) responses. Read on to find out why Underwood couldn’t have been a Republican, how comedy plays into House of Cards, and what Frank advice might look like. Ryan Merola: How did you decide that making Underwood a Blue Dog Democrat from South Carolina would be both a fair analogy to the original British villain-protagonist as well as a good avenue for making your […]

Curtain Call: One Simple Rule

Psychosis. Architecture. Rock music. Dead stars. Racial politics. Could this be another Seriously Entertaining show from the House of SpeakEasy? You might think that; we couldn’t possibly comment. But yes, this month’s line-up is certainly a sizzler. Best-selling novelist Tom Rob Smith rubs shoulders with House of Cards creator Beau Willimon; poet and actress Amber Tamblyn clinks glasses with Turkish author and human rights activist Elif Shafak; and rock journalist Lisa Robinson breaks bread with Obie Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Get a taster of what you might expect on Tuesday with our pick of the internet’s videos. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘s plays include Neighbors, Appropriate, War, and An Octoroon, which recently concluded a triumphant second run at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. In his review of the transfer, The New York Times‘s Ben Brantley commented, “in its current incarnation, ‘An Octoroon’ feels even richer and more resonant than it did before, both funnier and more profoundly tragic.” In our review, we called it “an eloquent dissertation on the seeming impossibility of talking meaningfully about race in the United States.” Jacobs-Jenkins won the Obie Award for best new American play for An Octoroon and Appropriate in 2014; here he talks about his historical sources for An Octoroon and the battle over authentically representing slaves. In several decades traveling […]

Life on the Farm: A Dark, Disturbing Thriller

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith Grand Central Publishing, 2014; 400pp You’re walking home. You get a phone call from your father. He’s upset. Your mother has been committed to an asylum. “The symptoms started gradually,” he tells you; “anxiety and odd comments, we can all suffer from that. Then came the allegations. She claims she has proof, she talks about evidence and suspects, but it’s nonsense and lies.” Before you know it, you’re meeting your mother at the airport. She looks crumpled, distressed; she’s lost weight. She’s carrying with her a bag which she says contains “evidence that I’m not mad. Evidence of crimes being covered up.” What do you do, and who do you believe? This is the intriguing premise of Tom Rob Smith‘s new thriller, The Farm. It also actually happened, pretty much, to Smith. Like his protagonist, Daniel, he’s half-Swedish on his mother’s side, his parents retired to a farm in a remote community in Sweden, and he was disturbed one day on his way home by a call from his father telling him his mother had been committed. Like Tilde in The Farm, she also managed to discharge herself, fly to England, and attempt to convince her son that his […]

The Life and Death of the Hollywood Actress

Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn Harper Perennial, 2015; 128pp “It’s not easy to write about your dead peers,” said Amber Tamblyn in an interview with Rachel Simon at Bustle published this week. “I was giving myself a lot of permissions that I normally wouldn’t… and telling myself that’s how I am going to get closer to the story, that’s how I’m going to become one with them. But I can’t write like that. It just made it even darker.” Tamblyn’s third collection of poems, Dark Sparkler, is indeed a rhapsody in black, a threnody for the victims of Hollywood. Some of these women (they’re all women) you might know: Brittany Murphy, Sharon Tate, Marilyn Monroe. Others you probably don’t. As poet Diane di Prima writes in a foreword to the book, “At some point you will begin to get curious… At that point, go to the library or search the Internet for information about any girl/woman you find yourself thinking about. Look up Peg Entwistle, Bridgette Andersen, Samantha Smith.” This, it seems, is pretty much what Tamblyn did. In eight black pages in the epilogue (the book is fabulously designed), we see what appears to be her (re)search history for the book, including (out of sequence; […]

The Argument From Design

The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak Viking, 2014; 432pp In a world of inter-religious conflict, plague, and natural disasters, the most elegant teleology may be found in architecture. This is Elif Shafak‘s proposition in her ambitious new novel, The Architect’s Apprentice. Shafak is the mostly widely read female writer in Turkey, has 1.7 million Twitter followers, and in 2010 she was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She writes regularly for the Guardian on feminism, human rights, and the state of democracy in Turkey. Although The Architect’s Apprentice is a historical novel, set mostly in the sixteenth century in Istanbul, its author’s very contemporary concerns flow through it. Inspired by an image in Gulru Necipoglu’s The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, Shafak sets out to imagine the world and the people outside the frame of official history. As she describes it in her author’s note: it was a painting of Sultan Suleiman, tall and sleek in his kaftan. But it was the figures in the background that intrigued me. There was an elephant and a mahout [elephant tamer] in front of the Suleimaniye Mosque; they were hovering on the edge of the picture, as if ready to run away, unsure as […]

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