mcnally jackson | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: mcnally jackson

Review: The Children Act by Ian McEwan

The Children Act (Nan A. Talese, 2014) is a short novel, and this is, says writer Ian McEwan, a good thing: If we can make this fine distinction, it’s a short novel rather than a novella. But I do love this form. The idea of sitting down to a book that you could read in one sitting, or within three hours, much as you might go to a movie or an opera or a long play… You’ve got to establish characters very quickly, there’s room for one or two sub-plots. It’s a form I adore. — Ian McEwan on BBC Radio 4’s Today [listen here] At two hundred and twenty-one generously spaced pages, his thirteenth novel certainly fits the bill. But what The Children Act lacks in word count, it makes up for in the efficiency of its style and execution. McEwan’s protagonists have always known too little and too much. The precocious Briony Tallis, in Atonement, second-guesses rape where there’s none. Saturday‘s Henry Perowne is doubly fated by his understanding of his assailant’s Huntington’s disease. The plot of Enduring Love hangs on misunderstanding and uncertainty. In each of these books, as in The Children Act, what concerns McEwan is a kind of epistemology of “the instant.” Moments of […]

Roberto Bolaño’s Expanding Universe

The first English translation of one of Roberto Bolaño’s novels was published in 2003, the same year he died, at the age of fifty, of liver failure. Susan Sontag was his anglophone herald, referring to him, in her notes on By Night in Chile, as “the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Savage Detectives in a translation by Natasha Wimmer in 2007; it sold 22,000 copies in its first year. 2666, a colossal work unfinished at Bolaño’s death, followed in 2008. As Chris Andrews reports in his new book, “Within days of publication, Farrar, Straus rushed out a second printing, bringing the total to more than 75,000 copies.” These are exceptional figures in the realm of translated fiction, not least as only two or three percent of books published in the US each year began life in other languages. Why Bolaño? Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe (Columbia University Press, 2014) is the work of a person who can perhaps answer that question with greater authority than most. Andrews has translated six novels and four short-story collections by Bolaño, and his close readings of the work are the bedrock of this […]

Inside the Lie

September 29, 2014. As an amber-violet sunset spread across a CinemaScope sky to the west of Manhattan, the House of SpeakEasy returned to City Winery for the inaugural show of its fall season. Almost three hundred guests gathered to listen, to laugh, to share, and to refill their glasses as six writers — Marcelo Gleiser, Natalie Haynes, John Guare, Gary Shteyngart, Gail Sheehy, and Andrew Solomon — took to the stage to ponder this month’s theme, Inside the Lie. This month’s guest stars? Copernicus, RFK, Oedipus, Sophia Loren’s panties, an uncommon family set-up, a Bavarian porn star… We’ll be posting videos from the show soon, but here’s a sneak preview of what went down when the curtain went up… Marcelo Gleiser: “We matter because we are very rare…” Marcelo Gleiser set the scene in 1543 with the death of Copernicus. The Prussian math genius supposedly died with his newly published masterwork, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in his hands, horrified by the preface tacked on by Lutheran nay-sayer Andreas Osiander that essentially discredited all that followed. Copernicus’s theory — maybe the sun… doesn’t orbit the earth? — would of course turn the world upside down (pun). But reversing the cosmic order, especially one which […]

Big Success in Little Failure

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. — Gary Shteyngart I’m pleased to report that Gary Shteyngart’s memoir, Little Failure, in no way lives up to its title. Instead, it’s a brilliant, milk-snortingly funny ride from 1970s Leningrad through 1980s Queens to 1990s Ohio and beyond. The humour you might expect from the novelist behind The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead, 2002), Absurdistan (Random House, 2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, 2010) is all present and correct. But that’s not all. Little Failure is also a sad-funny-awkward portrait of Shteyngart’s parents, whose Russian ways and tiny failures of assimilation so acutely embarrass and enrage him while growing up. Returning with them to Russia as an adult toward the end of the book, he makes discoveries about their past, his own prehistory, that shed new light on the rest of the book’s action. Much of Little Failure concerns Gary’s difficult formative years following his emigration in 1979 (he was born in 1972). Debilitating asthma prevents his becoming athletic; in the wake of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, his Russian-ness alienates him from his Jewish schoolmates at the Solomon Schechter School […]

Curtain Call: Inside the Lie

Seriously Entertaining is back! The first of our two shows this fall, Inside the Lie, hits City Winery on Monday, September 29, with a mind-expanding line-up of literary talent. Don’t have your tickets yet? Check out our writers below in an audiovisual preview of some of the pleasures that await you. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist specializing in particle cosmology. He’s also one of the great elucidators. Gleiser’s work is remarkably accessible, cracking open the hardest nuts of quantum physics and cosmology for the general reader. Books include The Prophet and the Astronomer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which investigates the ongoing search for meaning in the stars, and, most recently, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014). Read our review of The Island of Knowledge here, follow Marcelo on Twitter, and watch his Ted Talk on the origins of life here: John Guare‘s fifty-year career on the American stage and screen has been marked by some stunning highs, including the Tony Award-winning success of The House of Blue Leaves, Louis Malle’s classic 1980 movie Atlantic City, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and, more recently, A Free Man of Color (2010). Check out our survey of […]

Far From the Tree: Andrew Solomon on How to Love Your Children

If, like me, you saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead at an impressionable age, or The Omen, or you read Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, the prospect of parenthood may be haunted by the fear that your progeny turn out in some way aberrant. Read Andrew Solomon‘s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner Books, 2012), though, and you will be haunted much more by the word aberrant ever having crossed your mind. Through twelve chapters, Solomon investigates the experiences of parents and children living with deafness, dwarfism, transgenderism, criminality, prodigiousness, autism, schizophrenia, Down Syndrome, severe disability, or a history of rape. “This book’s conundrum,” Solomon writes in the introductory chapter, “is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.” Far From the Tree, a book ten years in the writing, drawing on interviews with more than three hundred families, yielding forty thousand pages of transcripts, progresses steadily towards an understanding of that gratitude. In so doing, it’s a book that might actually change your life. For the most part, Solomon investigates so-called “horizontal” (uninherited) identities. These may include differences of sexuality, physical or mental disability, psychopathy, genius, or […]

Five Reasons to Love Bret Easton Ellis Online

Does anyone know who @BretEastonEllis is?— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) April 10, 2009 It’s boring to call Bret Easton Ellis “controversial.” Yeah, American Psycho was once the subject of NOW boycotts and mock-distress middlebrow brouhaha. True, Ellis’s work traffics in the sort of content — sexual, violent, linguistic — that falls firmly into the NSFW category. And yes, his Twitter feed has often sent seismic tremors through the blogosphere, as when he compared watching Glee to stepping in “a puddle of HIV“, or when he suggested that Kathryn Bigelow was overrated “since she’s a hot woman“. Or even, come to think it, when on the occasion of J.D. Salinger’s death he proclaimed, “Party tonight!!!” (He later apologised over the Bigelow tweets in an article in The Daily Beast, admitting that they weren’t “really fun or that provocative.” Most of the time, though, he’s unequivocal.) But once all the fuss dies down — as it always does — doesn’t he sometimes have a point? To write him off is to naysay one of America’s fiercest and most insightful cultural critics. From his Empire/post-Empire theory and his passionate advocacy for grown-up moviemaking to his dismantling of political correctness and the sexy, celeb-soaked excerpts of his LA life, Ellis’s is […]

The Sea, Inside & Out

Seeing “the watery part of the world” was, for Melville’s Ishmael, a way of “driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.” One feels it’s probably the same for Philip Hoare. Five years ago, his terrific Leviathan, or The Whale (published in the US as The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea) won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. He’s followed it up with another maritime adventure, The Sea Inside — published, appropriately, by the Brooklyn-based Melville House. Between times, he co-curated the Moby Dick Big Read, a series of podcasts featuring everyone from Tilda Swinton to Sir David Attenborough and Benedict Cumberbatch to Fiona Shaw, reading the book chapter by chapter. You could say Hoare loves a whale. Which is why it might come as a surprise to fans of Leviathan that it takes so long for any cetaceans to appear in The Sea Inside. (Like Moby-Dick, actually, at the risk of spoilers.) But fear not! Hoare’s latest is just as magical as his last, and in fact this time round I was easily as roused by the other members of his menagerie, in particular the birds. He has a great eye for social detail. Did you know that the eurasian osytercatcher […]