Posts From Author: Blog
Seriously Questioning…Adam Begley
Adam Begley is the author of Updike and, most recently, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera. He was the books editor of The New York Observer for twelve years. A Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, the London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives with his wife in Cambridgeshire. On September 26th, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, One for the Road alongside Ann Brashares, Erica Wagner, and Loudon Wainwright III (tickets). We spoke to Adam ahead of the show… Name: Adam Begley Title of most recent work: The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera. (Read reviews from The Spectator and the NY Times) Describe your current project: I’m currently working on a brief biography of Houdini for the Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” series. What is your favorite line from your current work? Nadar once described himself as “never having missed the opportunity to talk about rope in a house where someone has been hanged or ought to be hanged.” What is your favorite first line of a novel? “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some […]
Read MoreSeriously Questioning…Ada Calhoun
Ada Calhoun is the author of two nonfiction books recently published by W.W. Norton & Co.: St. Marks Is Dead was named a New York Times Editors’ Pick, Amazon Book of the Month, and one of the best books of the year by Kirkus, The Boston Globe, Orlando Weekly, and The Village Voice, which called it 2015’s “Best Nonfiction Book About New York.” Her most recent work, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, is a book of essays about marriage and was released this May. On June 14, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, By the Light of the Moon alongside Brad Gooch, Harry Evans, and Glenn Frankel (tickets). We spoke to Ada ahead of the show. Name: Ada Calhoun Age: 41 Where are you from? St. Marks Place, NYC What is your occupation? Writer Title of most recent work: Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give What are you working on now? A sleep-deprived book tour. If you had to paint a scene from your childhood to capture its essence, what would you paint? I grew up in the East Village in the ‘80s (which I wrote about in my 2015 book St. Marks Is Dead). I’d paint the sidewalk at the […]
Read MoreSeriously Questioning… Glenn Frankel
Glenn Frankel is an author and journalist, based in Arlington, Virginia. Most recently, he served as the director of the School of Journalism and G.B. Dealey Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also spent time as a visiting journalism professor at Stanford University and an Alicia Patterson Fellow. Notably, he won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting when he served as Washington Post reporter, editor, and bureau chief in London, Southern Africa, and Jerusalem. His book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller and a Library Journal Top Ten book for 2013. His new book explores the Hollywood blacklist and the making of the classic western High Noon. On June 14, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, By the Light of the Moon alongside Brad Gooch, Harry Evans, and Ada Calhoun (tickets). We spoke to Glenn ahead of the show. Name: Glenn Frankel Age: 67 Where are you from? Born in the Bronx but raised in Rochester NY. What is your occupation? Author and Journalist Title of most recent work: High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic What are you […]
Read MoreSeriously 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 […]
Read MoreSeriously 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 […]
Read MoreSeriously 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 […]
Read MoreSeriously 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 […]
Read MoreSeriously 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 […]
Read MoreSeriously 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 […]
Read More