Interviews | House of SpeakEasy NYC

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Seriously 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 […]

Seriously 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 […]

Seriously 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 […]

Seriously 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 […]

Seriously 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 […]

Seriously 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 […]

Seriously Questioning… Idra Novey

To translate is not just to render in a different language but (done well) to ventriloquize the soul of another. It is to understand undercurrents transcendently, better to realize meaning. Translation isn’t just Babel fishing; it’s screen printing, recreation, midwifery. Idra Novey, the Brooklyn-based novelist and poet who’s translated Clarice Lispector, Paulo Henriques Britto, and Lascano Tegui, last year made the translation-metaphor into a witty, fast-paced debut novel called Ways To Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016; newly in paperback). At its outset, Beatriz Yagoda, one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, disappears up a tree. Thousands of miles away, her English translator, Emma, hears of her strange vanishing and takes the first flight to Rio to get to the bottom of things. But how well does anyone really know her? Yagoda’s daughter, for one, holds no truck with “the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels”. For Emma, though, who used her direct experience and memories of the author “to illuminate the strange, dark boats of Beatriz’s images as she ferried them into English”, there seems to be at least a degree of metaphysical understanding. “For translation to be an art,” Yagoda once told her, “you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an […]

Seriously Questioning… Richard Cohen

In How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers (Random House, 2016), Richard Cohen shares with readers the magpied loot of a lifetime of reading. Packed with examples from the best of world literature and interspersed with anecdotes from his one-time day job as an editor (he’s worked with Fay Weldon, Kingsley Amis, Simon Winchester, Madeleine Albright, Rudy Giuliani, John le Carré…), it’s a hugely entertaining book and one that’ll send you straight to your local library to fill in the gaps in your own reading. The first rule of Write Club seems to be that there are no rules. Every writer’s approach is different. Take the creation of characters: some let their characters guide the plot, some let them serve it; one writer may interview their characters, another will barely define them. While Dostoyevsky may have worried brilliantly over the naming of Raskolnikov, Alistair MacLean was so untaken with the importance of names that he allowed Cohen to change those of minor characters sight unseen. Cohen shares his insights into beginnings and endings, not to mention his foray into the Literary Review‘s “Bad Sex in Fiction” archives. (Who writes sex well? you might ask. “Recently I’ve been reading Elena Ferrante,” Cohen remarked in a chat […]

Seriously Questioning… Madeleine Thien

Last month, Madeleine Thien‘s third novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Do Not Say We Have Nothing (W.W. Norton), which is set in both present-day Vancouver and the China of Mao and Tiananmen Square, captivates from its opening paragraph: “In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.” The book’s structure allows Thien’s considerable talent free rein, as stories within stories proliferate and she hops nimbly between countries and time periods. “To write a novel is to find many other ways of being alive,” she told the Guardian last week; reading this marvelously rich book, you’ll believe that to read a novel might afford the same opportunities. The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced on the evening of Thursday, October 25, and Madeleine will join House of SpeakEasy at its next Seriously Entertaining show, Razor’s Edge, in New York City on November 1. Before then, we spoke to her about art, Johann Sebastian Bach, and discovering literature. Name: Madeleine Thien Age: 42 Where are you from? Montreal, by way of Vancouver. What is your occupation? Words, sentences and time travel. Title […]

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