Joel Rose was was co-founder and editor of the legendary and influential Lower East Side literary magazine Between C and D, published in the 1980s. He is also the author of the novels Kill the Poor and Kill Kill Faster Faster, both of which have been made into feature films. His other books include The Blackest Bird, New York Sawed in Half, and the bestselling graphic novel, co-written with Anthony Bourdain, Get Jiro!. His and Bourdain’s new graphic novel, Hungry Ghosts, is out in October. On October 16, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Forget Me Not, alongside Gregory Pardlo, Itamar Moses, and Laura Spinney. We spoke to Joel ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? My mother was sick my whole life. I went to college as a pre-med. Our family doctor told me repeatedly one day, with an education, I would cure my mother. The first day we were asked to write an essay. I wrote about being four years old and wearing a cowboy outfit on the street. The neighborhood kids beat me up. When I went home crying my mother took me outside and told the kids I was too a real cowboy, […]

Laura Spinney is an author and science journalist. She has published two novels in English, The Doctor and The Quick. Her third book of non-fiction, Rue Centrale, came out in 2013 from Editions L’Age d’Homme (in French and in English), and her fourth, a tale of the Spanish flu called Pale Rider, came out in 2017.  She also writes on science for National Geographic, The Economist, Nature, New Scientist and The Telegraph among others. On October 16, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Forget Me Not, alongside Gregory Pardlo, Itamar Moses, and Joel Rose. We spoke to Laura ahead of the show. What is your favorite first line of a novel? I love the first line of Vivant Denon’s novella “No Tomorrow” (which he wrote in his native language, French). Technically it’s two sentences, but nobody seems to mind: “I was madly in love with the Countess of…; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I protested, she left me. I was naive, I pined for her; I was twenty, she forgave me: and as I was twenty, naive, still cuckolded but no longer deserted, I considered myself the luckiest of her lovers, the happiest of men.” What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Don’t be precious about words. Throw away many more than […]

Gregory Pardlo’s ​collection​ Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was released by Knopf in April.  On October 16, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Forget Me Not, alongside Laura Spinney, Itamar Moses, and Joel Rose. We spoke to Gregory ahead of the show. What is your favorite first line of a novel? “Call me Ishmael.” What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Embrace rejection. If your feelings are easily hurt, you’ll never get any writing done. What writer past or present do you wish you could eat dinner with? Octavia Butler What are you reading right now? The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin What fictional character do you most closely identify with? Captain Nemo

Itamar Moses is the Tony Award-winning author of the full-length plays The Band’s Visit, Outrage, Bach At Leipzig, Celebrity Row, The Four of Us, Yellowjackets, Back Back Back, and Completeness, and various short plays and one-acts. His work has appeared Off-Broadway and elsewhere in New York, at regional theatres across the country and in Canada, and has been published by Faber & Faber, Heinemann Press, Playscripts Inc., Samuel French, Inc., and Vintage. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, MCC Playwrights Coalition, Naked Angels Mag 7, and is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. He is presently adapting Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress Of Solitude. On October 16, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Forget Me Not, alongside Laura Spinney, Gregory Pardlo, and Joel Rose. We spoke to Itamar ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? My earliest memories of reading are probably reading children’s books during free time at school. And reading in bed for as long as I was allowed before having to turn off the light. I was a big reader as a kid. My earliest memories of writing are probably stories I had to write in school — which I always liked. Creative work never […]

Richard M. Cohen is a journalist and producer, having spent 25 years in network television news on shows such as PBS’s McNeil Lehrer Report and The CBS Evening News, where he was the recipient of numerous awards in journalism, including three Emmys, a George Foster Peabody and a Cable Ace Award. Cohen is the author of a number of New York Times bestselling books, including Blindsided, Strong at the Broken Places, and, most recently, Chasing Hope. On September 18, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, The Long Way, alongside Faith Salie, Sofija Stefanovic, and Elliot Ackerman. We spoke to Richard ahead of the show. Describe your writing style. My writing style grew out of my years in television news. I learned that readers would say, Show me, don’t tell me. I try to write visually and take the reader to whatever I am describing. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? As a child, I was an avid reader. My earliest memory of books is the Hardy Boys series, especially The Tower Treasure. Maybe it was that high adventure that drove me into journalism. What is your favorite first line of a novel? “All this happened, more or less.” In […]

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Dark at the Crossing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Green on Blue. His writings have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. On September 18, he will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, The Long Way, alongside Faith Salie, Sofija Stefanovic, and Richard M. Cohen. We spoke to Elliot ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? My father, who I love dearly and who also has always been a workaholic, would watch my brother and me on the weekends so that my mother could work (she is a writer). Part of his regimen with us was that we’d have to read for at least an hour in our rooms. Those Saturday afternoons, forced to sit in my room and read were one of my earliest memories of reading. […]

Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She also hosts the PBS show, Science Goes to the Movies. Her book, Approval Junkie, a collection of essays chronicling her lifelong quest for validation, has been called “disturbingly hilarious.” On September 18, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, The Long Way, alongside Elliot Ackerman, Sofija Stefanovic, and Richard M. Cohen. We spoke to Faith ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? Sitting on my mother’s lap as she reads me The Giving Tree in a rocking chair, and falling asleep as a small child, listening to my father compose his doctoral dissertation on the typewriter in the next room. What is your favorite line from your current work? I’d rather fail dramatically than risk complacency. Focus on being beautiful if you want to get something from people. Focus on being smart and/or funny if you want to give something to people. The vulnerability of wanting approval, the shared human-ness of the appeal, and the honesty of appreciating it deeply mitigates any of its aggressiveness. What is your favorite first line of a novel? Can there […]