Summertime Blues
We don’t believe in fate at the House of SpeakEasy but there was something of the pathetic fallacy in last week’s show, Summertime Blues, falling as it did at the start of a gloomily...
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To Be Frank
Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage Barney Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 400pp “In 1954, I was a fairly normal fourteen-year-old, enjoying...
read moreCurtain Call: Summertime Blues
Hey, so it hit ninety degrees this week in New York City. That’s right: the sort of temperatures that mean you have to wear two, maybe three outfits a day. After six months of...
read morePlato at the Googleplex: Review
Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Knopf Doubleday / Vintage, 2014; 480pp “Just accept the one preposterous premise that Plato...
read moreReview: Gabriel – A Poem, by Edward Hirsch
Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch Knopf Doubleday, 2014; 96pp A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; 736pp How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward...
read moreFail Better
The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis Simon & Schuster, 2014; 272pp In 2010, Sandra Bullock was briefly my favorite person in the world. In...
read moreSteven Pinker On Style
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker Viking, 2014; 368pp Is it better to err unwittingly or to be all crouching pedant, hidden snoot?...
read moreReadEasy, 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...
read moreOne 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?...
read moreSheep-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...
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