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Posts From Author: Month: February 2015

Are you there, Antiquity? It’s me, A.E. Stallings

Olives by A.E. Stallings TriQuarterly Books, 2012; 80pp The poems in Olives are smart yet accessible; beautiful but deadly; both tragic and humorous. In her third collection, following Archaic Smile (1999) and Hapax (2006), poet A.E. Stallings playfully blends ancient and modern, Persephone and Barney (yes the cute purple dinosaur), with strangely profound results. The collection’s four parts bear the faint imprint of overarching narrative: lovers flirt and argue; chaos and death threaten; redemption of sorts is found in offspring (though perhaps not in The Offspring, as the poem “Pop Music” wryly points out). The classical world makes for an atmospheric backdrop. Stallings, as most bios will tell you, moved from Athens, Georgia, to Athens, Greece, and the influence of all those ruins tells. But the modern persistently intrudes, not least in the form of the telephone, which, it’s suggested, is a sort of twenty-first-century deus ex machina (certainly a machina). “At any hour, the future or the past / Can dial into the room and change our lives,” writes Stallings in “Telephonophobia,” a poem placed in suggestive contiguity with one actually called “Deus Ex Machina.” One could hardly invent a Greeker-looking word than “Telephonophobia,” even if its provenance is incontrovertibly modern. And it’s this punning blend of past and present […]

ReadEasy, 25 February 2015

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy does the hard work so you don’t have to. Twenty minutes ago, I pressed SEND on my new book. NOW what shall I do?— Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) February 22, 2015 Also, totally read our reviews of Oscar-winning movies Boyhood, Whiplash, and Ida. Wanna see tomorrow’s prize-winners today? Buy tickets for No Return, our next Seriously Entertaining show at City Winery NYC, on March 9. Guests include horror maestro R.L. Stine (who we interviewed here), author and journalist Ben Yagoda (whose new book The B-Side we just reviewed), novelist Ian Caldwell, poet A.E. Stallings, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Is everyone watching the Oscars? Best line so far: "it takes balls to wear a dress like that."— Anne Rice (@AnneRiceAuthor) February 23, 2015 “How swiftly it both dulls the senses and raises your ire”: Gary Shteyngart watches Russian TV for a week… “With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church,” writes Shteyngart in the New York Times Magazine, “few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision.” This is why, he says, 2014 winner Conchita Wurst, an Austrian drag queen, met with such violent disgust in Russia, a country which refuses “to succumb to the rest of the world’s wimpy notions of tolerance.” New Year’s Eve on Russian TV […]

Stardust: The Rise and Fall of the Great American Songbook

The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song by Ben Yagoda Riverhead Books, 2015; 320pp “Loesser drew a picture of a train with a caboose and said, ‘This is what makes a good song. The locomotive has to start it. The caboose has to finish it off. Those are the bookends. Then you fill in different colors for the cars in the middle.'” – Jerry Herman recalls meeting Frank Loesser, in Ben Yagoda’s The B-Side American songwriting passes from the simple melodies of Tin Pan Alley through the crowning achievements of the Broadway musical to Pet Sounds in Ben Yagoda‘s smashing new book. A detailed study of the evolution of songwriting, The B-Side also offers great insights into America’s changing attitudes towards race, the institutional and industrial factors that shape taste, and how the great American public ditched Gershwin, Porter and Berlin in favor of “(How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window?“ “Nowadays, the consumption of songs in America is as constant as their consumption of shoes,” wrote the New York Times in 1910, “and the demand is similarly met by factory output.” This somewhat depressing assessment of the state of the art at the start of the twentieth century was […]

The Fall of the House of Sigerius

Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda; translated by Jonathan Reeder Hogarth, 2015; 544pp Bonita Avenue is a social-realist comedy and a nightmare thriller. Author Peter Buwalda uses three characters, each tunnel-visioned in their own way, to tell a claustrophobic and totally compelling family saga. We discover very early on where it’s all headed; to read Bonita Avenue is like being locked in the trunk of a car and driven forty miles of bad road at high speed to get there. The suspense lies in the how of it all, and Buwalda, with his gruesome, familicidal imagination, does not disappoint. Siem Sigerius is a sort of Dutch übermensch: judoka and mathematician of distinction; incipient politician; rector at Tubantia University. When we first meet him, in 1996, he’s in his fifties, and a man so popular that even a nude photo of him in the national press — sagging belly, leaping into water; snapped in a moment of college-sport hijinks — cannot scratch his reputation. As Michael Caine might say, though, he’s a big man but he’s out of shape. And out of joint, too, for he’s come to suspect that his stepdaughter, Joni, is the star attraction of a porn site he’s a member of. As the plot hurtles along, switching perspectives […]

ReadEasy, 16 February 2015

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 […]

Runnin’ Wild: The House of SpeakEasy Inaugurates Year 2

Undeterred by the Snowpocalypse-that-in-any-case-wasn’t, crowds flocked to City Winery on January 28 to celebrate the House of SpeakEasy‘s first birthday and bless its second year of existence. It was a star-studded affair: Uma Thurman was there; Dan Stevens; the amazing staff of Barnes & Noble Union Square… and that was just in the audience. SpeakEasy founders Amanda Foreman and Lucas Wittmann emceed the evening’s proceedings and introduced SpeakEasy novices to the organization’s mission and programs. These include SpeakFreely, an already active program which enables teachers and their students to attend our Seriously Entertaining shows at City Winery; SpeakTogether, which aims to place writers in educational settings where they can share ideas with students, particularly those with little or no usual access to such experiences; and SpeakUp, currently in development, which is hoping to introduce good books and their writers into neighborhoods with few or no bookstores. Simon Doonan was our first speaker of the evening. Barneys New York’s Creative Ambassador and a writer and speaker of significant distinction, Simon has published several books including Gay Men Don’t Get Fat (2012), and his most recent, The Asylum: True Tales of Madness From a Life in Fashion (2014). He shared with us […]

ReadEasy, 9 February 2015

A new feature for 2015, in ReadEasy we search the book stacks of the internet so you don’t have to. Just looked up THE FIRST BAD MAN on Amazon. It has 10 five star reviews and 10 one star reviews. Will check back in a few mos 2 see who won.— Miranda July (@Miranda_July) February 6, 2015 Hey! Buy tickets for our next show, No Return, here. It’s on March 9 at City Winery NYC, and will feature the talents of author and journalist Ben Yagoda, playwright Sarah Ruhl, poet A.E. Stallings, best-selling horror author R.L. Stine, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Darryl Pinckney on Selma… In this week’s New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney puts Selma, Ava DuVernay’s new movie about the voting rights marches in Alabama in 1965, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the historical-critical test. How much is really factual? Pinckney examines King’s relationship with President Johnson (read also The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson on why Selma is “more than fair to LBJ”), and fleshes out some of the movie’s minor characters, whose screen time inevitably elides their contribution to history. Most telling, though, are the passages on Dr. King’s infidelities. […]

Reviews: The Unspeakable; Amnesia

The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014; 256pp In “Matricide” Meghan Daum describes, in black-glass prose, an extraordinary cycle of horror. It begins with the death of her grandmother, continues with the passing — within a year — of her mother, almost culminates in her own demise through freak infection, and ends with a miscarriage. But this is by no means a misery diary. Rather, as she will throughout this excellent collection, Daum eschews propriety in pursuit of honesty, integrity… and black humor. This quite brilliant essay is really about a species of matrilineal distaste that many readers will surely recognize, even if few would admit it. Daum writes of the day her mother began “to self-define as a theater person” and her reaction (“allergic… on every level”) to the phoniness that followed. She tells of her mother’s spiteful outbursts at her father on hearing she has gallbladder cancer (“‘He’s happy,’ she hissed.”) And from the first sentences, she sets about destroying the clichés that surround death literature: People who weren’t there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by her loving family. This is technically true, though it […]

ReadEasy, 2 February 2015

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 […]