Posts From Author: Month: May 2018

Seriously Questioning…Caroline Weber

Caroline Weber is a Professor of French at Barnard and the author of The New York Times Notable Book, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of academic and mainstream publications. She has published articles on eighteenth-century authors such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Sade, Charrière, and La Chaussée, and on contemporary thinkers like Lacan and Lyotard. She writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her new book is Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin de Siecle Paris. Caroline is speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show on May 22nd, themed No Man’s Land, alongside Kashana Cauley, Lauren Hilgers, and Meg Wolitzer. We spoke to Caroline ahead of the show… What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? Waking up as a small child to find my canopy bed on fire because I had been reading under the covers so that my parents wouldn’t know I had stayed up past my bedtime & somehow the little camping lamp I was using overheated after I drifted off to sleep. I escaped the conflagration & was duly scolded by my parents but didn’t stop reading in bed after hours; I simply switched to […]
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Seriously Questioning…Kashana Cauley

Kashana Cauley is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Esquire, The New Yorker,  Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. She is a former staff writer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Kashana is speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show on May 22nd, themed No Man’s Land, alongside Lauren Hilgers, Caroline Weber, and Meg Wolitzer. We spoke to Kashana ahead of the show… What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? I wrote bad noir stories when I was ten in a notebook I hid under my bed. I thought noir stories were the kind that would be film in black and white, and had a detective in them, and some sex, even though I had no idea what sex was. I wrote stories and illustrated them with black and white drawings until my religious mother, horrified by whatever the hell I thought sex was, threw them out. What is your favorite first line of a novel? I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Petroskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.–Jeffrey […]
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Seriously Questioning…Lauren Hilgers

Lauren Hilgers is a journalist whose articles have appeared in Harper’s, Wired, Businessweek, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. Her new book is Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown. Lauren is speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show on May 22nd, themed No Man’s Land, alongside Caroline Weber and Meg Wolitzer. We spoke to Lauren ahead of the show…   What is your favorite first line of a novel? The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and as delicate as silver rods. –Sinclair Lewis, Babbit. What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Be persistent. What writer past or present do you wish you could eat dinner with? Mary Anne Evans. What writer do you wish you could share with the world? I’m an Emily Hahn evangelist. She was a writer who lived in Shanghai during the 1930s, and who ended up waiting out most of World War II in Hong Kong, after having an affair with a British spy. She was irreverent, charming, and a little bit insane. What are you reading right now? Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy.    
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