ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015 — because life’s hard enough already, amIright? https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/570321074988175360 Last Wednesday Tom McCarthy joined Dennis Lim, director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to discuss his new novel, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015), and to screen two avant-garde classics he considers to be in conversation with it: Antony Balch’s 1963 Towers Open Fire, starring William S. Burroughs, and Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 hijacking documentary, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. It was an extraordinary evening, with McCarthy and Grimonprez (a surprise and very welcome additional guest) at ease in an eclectic and ever-expanding frame of reference: Marvell, Spinoza, Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Lévi-Strauss, Warhol… Quoting Don DeLillo, in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Grimonprez’s narrators comment on the capacity of terrorists for “raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” While the figure of the terrorist haunted McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder (2005), it’s the figure of the Writer, Inc. — in the form of corporate anthropologist U. — who’s at the center of Satin Island. The migration of ideas from universities into corporations, appalling to some, is evident in the metaphors for contemporary being that emerge in U.’s digressive narration: metadata, buffering, and so on. It’s an excellent novel. Grimonprez and McCarthy also screened the promotional short […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy does the hard work so you don’t have to. Twenty minutes ago, I pressed SEND on my new book. NOW what shall I do?— Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) February 22, 2015 Also, totally read our reviews of Oscar-winning movies Boyhood, Whiplash, and Ida. Wanna see tomorrow’s prize-winners today? Buy tickets for No Return, our next Seriously Entertaining show at City Winery NYC, on March 9. Guests include horror maestro R.L. Stine (who we interviewed here), author and journalist Ben Yagoda (whose new book The B-Side we just reviewed), novelist Ian Caldwell, poet A.E. Stallings, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Is everyone watching the Oscars? Best line so far: "it takes balls to wear a dress like that."— Anne Rice (@AnneRiceAuthor) February 23, 2015 “How swiftly it both dulls the senses and raises your ire”: Gary Shteyngart watches Russian TV for a week… “With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church,” writes Shteyngart in the New York Times Magazine, “few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision.” This is why, he says, 2014 winner Conchita Wurst, an Austrian drag queen, met with such violent disgust in Russia, a country which refuses “to succumb to the rest of the world’s wimpy notions of tolerance.” New Year’s Eve on Russian TV […]

Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda; translated by Jonathan Reeder Hogarth, 2015; 544pp Bonita Avenue is a social-realist comedy and a nightmare thriller. Author Peter Buwalda uses three characters, each tunnel-visioned in their own way, to tell a claustrophobic and totally compelling family saga. We discover very early on where it’s all headed; to read Bonita Avenue is like being locked in the trunk of a car and driven forty miles of bad road at high speed to get there. The suspense lies in the how of it all, and Buwalda, with his gruesome, familicidal imagination, does not disappoint. Siem Sigerius is a sort of Dutch übermensch: judoka and mathematician of distinction; incipient politician; rector at Tubantia University. When we first meet him, in 1996, he’s in his fifties, and a man so popular that even a nude photo of him in the national press — sagging belly, leaping into water; snapped in a moment of college-sport hijinks — cannot scratch his reputation. As Michael Caine might say, though, he’s a big man but he’s out of shape. And out of joint, too, for he’s come to suspect that his stepdaughter, Joni, is the star attraction of a porn site he’s a member of. As the plot hurtles along, switching perspectives […]

Undeterred by the Snowpocalypse-that-in-any-case-wasn’t, crowds flocked to City Winery on January 28 to celebrate the House of SpeakEasy‘s first birthday and bless its second year of existence. It was a star-studded affair: Uma Thurman was there; Dan Stevens; the amazing staff of Barnes & Noble Union Square… and that was just in the audience. SpeakEasy founders Amanda Foreman and Lucas Wittmann emceed the evening’s proceedings and introduced SpeakEasy novices to the organization’s mission and programs. These include SpeakFreely, an already active program which enables teachers and their students to attend our Seriously Entertaining shows at City Winery; SpeakTogether, which aims to place writers in educational settings where they can share ideas with students, particularly those with little or no usual access to such experiences; and SpeakUp, currently in development, which is hoping to introduce good books and their writers into neighborhoods with few or no bookstores. Simon Doonan was our first speaker of the evening. Barneys New York’s Creative Ambassador and a writer and speaker of significant distinction, Simon has published several books including Gay Men Don’t Get Fat (2012), and his most recent, The Asylum: True Tales of Madness From a Life in Fashion (2014). He shared with us […]