Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate. On November 16, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, The Virtue of Vices, alongside Steve Almond, Alex Segura, and Cutter Wood. We spoke to Ingrid ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? Some of my earliest memories involve running down the stairs in the morning so I could snatch and smell the newspaper before anyone. I was addicted to the smell of newsprint. I remember impatiently looking at the letters, anxious to know what they said. What is your favorite line from your current work? “War always seemed distant from Bogota, like niebla descending on the hills and forests of the countryside and jungles. The way it approached us was like fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.” What is your favorite first line of a […]

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association. Her award-winning books include Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella), The Obama Victory (with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy), and the new Cyberwar. On November 13, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Divided We Stand, alongside Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lea Carpenter, and Jelani Cobb. We spoke to Kathleen ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? My mom signing the permission slip to let me check out books from the adult section of the public library in our home town when I was 8. What is your favorite line from your current work? The term “cyberwar” locates the sphere in which the attacks occurred; defines hacking, posting, impersonating, and strategic release of stolen con­tent as […]

Heather Havrilesky is the author of How to Be a Person in the World and the memoir Disaster Preparedness. She writes the “Ask Polly” column for New York Magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR’s All Things Considered, among others. She was Salon‘s TV critic for seven years. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a loud assortment of dependents, most of them nondeductible. On October 27, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Dazed and Confused, alongside Raymond Villareal, Reyna Grande, and Tarfia Faizullah. We spoke to Heather ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? This isn’t my earliest memory, but I read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles on a train from Durham to Philadelphia a few weeks after my dad died, and it was one of the most engrossing and surreal reading experiences I can recall. What is your favorite line from your current work? “I toss a wet dick across the grass for hours.” What advice would you give to aspiring writers? As a writer, you never really arrive anywhere. Instead of treating writing as a means to an end, you have to savor the work itself and […]

Reyna Granda s the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, where she writes about her life before and after illegally immigrating from Mexico to the United States. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home, will be released in October. The Distance Between Us is also available as a young readers edition. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges and cities across the country. Reyna has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards, and in 2015 she was honored with a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The young reader’s version of The Distance Between Us received a 2017 Honor Book Award for the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature and a 2016 Eureka! Honor Awards from the California Reading Association, and an International Literacy Association Children’s Book Award 2017. Reyna is a proud member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros, where she has also served as faculty. On October 27, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Dazed and Confused, alongside […]

Laura Spinney is an author and science journalist. She has published two novels in English, The Doctor and The Quick. Her third book of non-fiction, Rue Centrale, came out in 2013 from Editions L’Age d’Homme (in French and in English), and her fourth, a tale of the Spanish flu called Pale Rider, came out in 2017.  She also writes on science for National Geographic, The Economist, Nature, New Scientist and The Telegraph among others. On October 16, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Forget Me Not, alongside Gregory Pardlo, Itamar Moses, and Joel Rose. We spoke to Laura ahead of the show. What is your favorite first line of a novel? I love the first line of Vivant Denon’s novella “No Tomorrow” (which he wrote in his native language, French). Technically it’s two sentences, but nobody seems to mind: “I was madly in love with the Countess of…; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I protested, she left me. I was naive, I pined for her; I was twenty, she forgave me: and as I was twenty, naive, still cuckolded but no longer deserted, I considered myself the luckiest of her lovers, the happiest of men.” What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Don’t be precious about words. Throw away many more than […]