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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 […]

The Lusitania’s Last Voyage

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Erik Larson Crown Publishing, 2015; 448pp In six heart-stopping pages in the middle of Dead Wake, Erik Larson appears to suspend time in order to watch the deadly torpedo launched from German submarine U-20 shoot through the sea toward the doomed ocean liner Lusitania. In fact, the torpedo was only moving at about five miles per hour (reader, I can run faster), and its slow approach gave many of the ship’s passengers time to register both its vicious beauty and its coming intersection with their own fates. Initially, Larson tells us, “A number of officers raised binoculars and speculated that the object might indeed be a buoy, or a porpoise, or a fragment of drifting debris. No one expressed concern.” As it moved closer, though, its true nature became apparent and many panicked. Not Connecticut salesman James Brooks: He saw the body of the torpedo moving well ahead of the wake, through water he described as being “a beautiful green.” The torpedo “was covered with a silvery phosphorescence, you might term it, which was caused by the air escaping from the motors.” He said, “It was a beautiful sight.” In these six pages, we see the glint […]

A Decent Read

A Decent Ride Irvine Welsh Doubleday, 2016; 368pp “Drivin a taxi is the best joab ah’ve hud in ma puff,” remarks “Juice” Terry Lawson early on in Irvine Welsh‘s new novel, A Decent Ride. But this is not an ode to honest labor: “It’s best in August,” he continues, “wi aw the snobby tourist rides in the toon, but this time’s barry n aw, cause the festive period’s roond the corner n fanny are stoatin aboot rat-arsed.” Yes, after a darkly racy stopover in Miami for his last book, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, Welsh is back in the familiarly grimy Edinburgh streets of his best-known work, including Trainspotting and Glue, the 2001 novel which first introduced the world to the charming Terry. Welsh’s characters, here as elsewhere, are rogues, braggarts, scofflaws and villains; their lives are fuelled by booze, drugs, casual sex, and crime. But despite the ubiquitous indecency, Welsh’s work has always been driven by a fierce social conscience and a compassion for this particular world that’s absent in most other contemporary media. A Decent Ride, which refers both to Terry’s job as a taxi driver and his enthusiasm for sex, is in the end a rather more decent book than it first appears. There’s […]

Sell/Buy/Date

Sell/Buy/Date Written and performed by Sarah Jones Directed by Carolyn Cantor Playing at New York Live Arts until January 16 Note: This article concerns the workshop production of Sell/Buy/Date staged in New York in January 2016 A woman with a barcode tattooed on her ass. That was the image that stuck with me after Sarah Jones finally broke character and used her own voice to thank Friday night’s audience for attending this special workshop production of her exceptional one-woman show. Sell/Buy/Date is a humorous look at an unfunny subject — the sex industry’s capacity for exploitation — and it will be fascinating to see how the show develops during the course of its run at New York Live Arts and the months before of its world premiere later this year. Sell/Buy/Date is a work of speculative fiction. Set roughly a hundred years from now, the play explores potential developments in the relationship between sex and technology, and their effects on human interaction and psychology. Jones is a professor using “bio-empathetic resonant technology” (BERT) to teach her students about the sex industry of the past, a sort of VR that provides an alibi for Jones to adopt a series of personae who can tell us the imagined future-history of the twenty-first century. One […]

Altered States

“We’re going to get very intimate very quickly,” promised the evening’s first speaker, Tony Award-winning playwright Doug Wright, at the House of SpeakEasy’s Altered States at New York’s City Winery on September 22. And he wasn’t wrong. Obscure Ken Russell movies, Donald Trump’s dangerous experiment in democracy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the home life of a comedy legend were the stuff of SpeakEasy’s latest #SeriouslyEntertaining foray into the world of literary cabaret. “‘Altered States’ makes me think of an overindulgence in alcohol or recreational drug use,” began Wright, “but there’s only one time in my life when I was truly at the mercy of a hostile foreign chemical — and that was adolescence.” Puberty, for Wright, unfolded in early-70s Dallas, a time when Mark Spitz’s speedos and “fabulous 70s porn moustache” might occasion titillation, anxiety, and confusion for a young man. The guardian angel of Wright’s sexual awakening, though, was no Olympic athlete. The day before his tenth birthday, Wright saw The Homecoming on TV and found himself enchanted by a boy with “a shock of blond hair, big doey eyes, and a mole just like that singer I liked, Peggy Lee. He wasn’t good at farming and he didn’t like to hunt; he […]

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 tropical week in New York City. Fortunately, we had all the right ingredients to dispel any seasonal mooning. Our spring/summer finale featured Sarah Lewis, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Irvine Welsh, Laura Michelle Kelly, Edward Hirsch, and Steven Pinker, plus a whole lotta painting, philosophy, burger-flipping, poetry, and first dates. Sarah Lewis, first up, took us back into the past. Her grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, a bassist who played with Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, turned to the arts in high school, when he “asked his teacher where African-Americans were in the history books. And his teacher had told him,” Lewis continued, “that we had done nothing to merit inclusion. For his repeated insistence on asking that question, he was expelled from high school.” “He certainly is not alone in being inspired on to creative heights through the adversity borne by the foundations of his own life. My grandfather inspired me to consider this phenomenon more closely. I was so inspired that I wrote an entire book about it, entitled The Rise.” (Read our review of The Rise here). “At the end of […]

Curtain 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 winter, sure, you think, why not? Until you get on the subway. Or have to move quickly between two different places in midtown. Or start to genuinely consider buying an e-reader because carrying Henry James around in this inferno is just like way too much. Do you have the Summertime Blues? We’ve got the cure. Join us at City Winery NYC on Monday, June 15, for another Seriously Entertaining lineup of writing talent. Wanna meet them first? Read on, amigos. (And don’t forget to buy tickets.) Ian McEwan has called her “a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.” She’s a philosopher and a novelist. In her novels The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light, she borrowed concepts from philosophy and quantum physics to explore our basic instincts. Her books on theology, as well as philosophers like Plato, Spinoza, and Gödel, have earned her a large and devoted following. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and her husband, Steven Pinker, will be our first “Seriously Entertaining couple”. Read: […]

One 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? Well, sometimes it’s best not to. Everyone should know CPR? Granted; hard to argue. Back up your work? Phew, yes, we’d all have saved ourselves some stress by following that one. Break all of the rules, always? We don’t like to be too prescriptive here… Well, we’ll leave you to judge, as you enjoy the wit and wisdom of Elif Shafak, Tom Rob Smith, Amber Tamblyn, Lisa Robinson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Beau Willimon. Elif Shafak was first up to the mic. An industrious author, Shafak has published several novels, numerous articles, and a collection of nonfiction. She’s a TED Talker. She’s Turkey’s most widely read female writer. She’s perplexed, then, by what she perceives to be a cult of idleness among many Middle Eastern men. “All across the Middle East, if you travel,” she said, “you will come across thousands and thousands of men — and always men — just sitting, playing backgammon, chatting — smoking, mostly — until it’s time to go home.” These men are not the subjects of her work, though. “What I’m interested in […]

Curtain Call: One Simple Rule

Psychosis. Architecture. Rock music. Dead stars. Racial politics. Could this be another Seriously Entertaining show from the House of SpeakEasy? You might think that; we couldn’t possibly comment. But yes, this month’s line-up is certainly a sizzler. Best-selling novelist Tom Rob Smith rubs shoulders with House of Cards creator Beau Willimon; poet and actress Amber Tamblyn clinks glasses with Turkish author and human rights activist Elif Shafak; and rock journalist Lisa Robinson breaks bread with Obie Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Get a taster of what you might expect on Tuesday with our pick of the internet’s videos. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘s plays include Neighbors, Appropriate, War, and An Octoroon, which recently concluded a triumphant second run at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. In his review of the transfer, The New York Times‘s Ben Brantley commented, “in its current incarnation, ‘An Octoroon’ feels even richer and more resonant than it did before, both funnier and more profoundly tragic.” In our review, we called it “an eloquent dissertation on the seeming impossibility of talking meaningfully about race in the United States.” Jacobs-Jenkins won the Obie Award for best new American play for An Octoroon and Appropriate in 2014; here he talks about his historical sources for An Octoroon and the battle over authentically representing slaves. In several decades traveling […]