March 2014 – House of SpeakEasy NYC

Post March 5, 2014

“everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes”: Susan Cheever’s E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever’s new biography of E.E. Cummings (Pantheon Books, 2014), “one of the great and most important American poets”, begins with the two of them meeting. By the second half of his career Cummings had become a successful public speaker, supplementing the income he brought home with his poetry by accepting invitations to colleges and […]

Post March 4, 2014

Jay McInerney’s The Good Life

In a 2005 article for the Guardian entitled “The uses of invention”, Jay McInerney set out to counter the prevalent concern that literature was no longer up to the task, following 9/11, of processing world events. His contribution to the proof was The Good Life (2006), a novel set in the autumn of 2001 in the bedrooms of wealthy Manhattanites dealing […]