Posts From Author: Month: March 2017

Seriously Questioning… Tony Tulathimutte

Last year Tony Tulathimutte published his first novel, Private Citizens (William Morrow, 2016), to admiring notices from New York Magazine, which called it “a Great American Novel“, and Jonathan Franzen, who labeled Tulathimutte “a big talent“. Last week he won the Whiting Award for Fiction. Next week he will join our Seriously Entertaining line-up at Joe’s Pub for The End My Friend, alongside Ana Marie Cox, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Travon Free (tickets). We’re excited. Come. What’s the big deal? Private Citizens is, as Franzen suggests, “a real book”. Tulathimutte, like Franzen, is haunted by difficulty. The difficulty of behaving ethically in a world where the cards are stacked against you. The difficulty of emotional connection between intellects capable of second-, third-, fourth-guessing each other. Many times during Private Citizens I thought of the “Gary” section in The Corrections, a brilliantly sustained cadenza of rising panic in which Franzen’s Gary slowly collapses under the combined pressures of family, career, and hyperreality. So too do Tulathimutte’s protagonists — social warriors, entrepreneurs, tech mavens; hot messes and intellectuals all — find themselves hemmed in by a culture that is changing faster than human emotion can keep up. The novel is set, appropriately, in 2008, a […]
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Seriously Questioning… Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy’s witty, moving, fiery new collection, So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), takes us into the past. In its longest poem, “Is There Something I Should Know?”, Shaughnessy remembers a world of Simple Minds and Duran Duran songs, where she finds a young woman haunted by the changes in her body, caught in “pubescence’s acrid synthesis”, betrayed by her own functions and the silence of others (“No one discussed it or acknowledged it / even though we ALL READ THE JUDY BLUME”). Shaughnessy’s previous work includes Our Andromeda (2012), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, The International Griffin Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, O Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Brenda Shaughnessy will appear alongside Tony Tulathimutte, Travon Free, and Ana Marie Cox at our next Seriously Entertaining show, The End My Friend, at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on April 6. Buy tickets here. Name: Brenda Shaughnessy. Where are you from? Born in Okinawa, Japan. Raised in Southern California. What is your occupation? Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Title of most recent work: So Much Synth. What are you working on now? Mentoring our future poets. If […]
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Seriously Questioning… Travon Free

Travon Free was a Division I college basketball player before he became a stand-up comedian, comedy writer and actor. He has written for The Daily Show, for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 2015, and recently for HBO’s Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons. Currently, he co-hosts The Room Where It’s Happening: A Hamilton Fan Podcast and writes for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. We spoke to Travon ahead of his appearance at our Seriously Entertaining show The End My Friend at Joe’s Pub on April 6, 2017, alongside Ana Marie Cox, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Tony Tulathimutte. Name: Travon Free. Age: 31. Where are you from? Compton, CA. What is your occupation? Writer/comedian/actor. What are you working on right now? Writer: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Which day in your life would you repeat? The day I won an Emmy. Which day would you delete? The day Donald Trump was elected. For obvious reasons. What do you most look forward to? Breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then putting my work into the world and seeing how it affects people’s lives. What do you hope future civilizations will find in the miraculously preserved shell of your apartment? My […]
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