ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015, diving for pearls in a sea of noise. John Adams's "dazzling portrait of virtuosic femininity" @nyphil this week: http://t.co/MxhTjO85CI (Photo: Chris Lee) pic.twitter.com/1hpW8FVS4r— House of SpeakEasy (@SpeakEasy_House) March 29, 2015 Stephen Kotkin and Slavoj Zizek on Stalin… On Tuesday night in the New York Public Library’s beautiful (but chilly) Celeste Bartos Forum, Paul Holdengraber invited Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek to interview historian Stephen Kotkin about his new book Stalin, Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (The Penguin Press, 2014), and, in his famous formulation, “make the lions roar.” (An appropriate setting, it turned out, as Kotkin did much of his research in the NYPL.) In front of an excited and packed house, Zizek was typically ebullient (“I have so many provocative questions!”) and Kotkin an excellent foil, answering questions from both his co-host and the audience methodically and humorously. Particularly entertaining was his slideshow of scenes from Stalin’s early life (“This is Stalin’s birth-hovel… Notice the attitude, aged ten…”) Zizek suggested that the strength of Kotkin’s new study lies in its refusal to fall into the trap of seeking a “bourgeois, liberal secret” that explains away Stalin’s pathology. This is no mean feat; as Kotkin pointed out, “in history, […]

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 is a weekly boat trip up the crazy river of the internet. How do YOU celebrate Friday the 13th? I always eat a live chihuahua. How about you?— R.L. Stine (@RL_Stine) February 13, 2015 …and if you enjoyed that: R.L. Stine joins our fabulous line-up for No Return on March 9 at City Winery! Also appearing will be author and journalist Ben Yagoda, playwright Sarah Ruhl, poet A.E. Stallings, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Buy tickets now! Katherine Heiny on Ira Levin… “Ira Levin is subtle in the way a vodka Collins is subtle,” says Heiny in The Atlantic: “you’re innocently going along, thinking wow, this a light refreshing drink and the next thing you know, you wake up in bed with the pizza delivery guy and no idea where your clothes are.” Rereading The Stepford Wives (1972), Heiny offers an appreciation of Levin’s uncanny drip-feed approach to narrative detail, rewarding both the observant and the repeat reader. “These details need to be subtle enough that the reader risks missing them — because life rarely hits us over the head — but they should also contain great significance for someone who’s looking or listening closely.” Some of these can be direct borrowings from life: “I remember a […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is us foraging through the underbrush of the World Wide Web so you don’t have to. I'm working on my cabaret act, which is me just singing songs from Warner Brothers cartoons passionately in order to annoy my kids.— Elizabeth McCracken (@elizmccracken) January 31, 2015 Katy Steinmetz on the power of words… Perhaps you read transgender teen Leelah Alcorn‘s suicide note recently. A horrifying jolt to many of its readers, Leelah’s call for a “fix” for society found sympathetic ears on the internet tragically too late for its author. Perhaps not coincidentally, President Obama just became the first president of the United States to use the word “transgender” in a State of the Union address (see context, right). As Katy Steinmetz writes in TIME, “The issues of validity and legitimacy are huge ones for transgender people.” The significance of even such a casual reference as this, she argues — the power of a single usage — could prove immeasurable. “To have Obama offer up recognition using the word that the community itself uses — rather than circling the issue with some vague phrase like ‘regardless of how someone identifies’ — is him implying that […]