Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate. On November 16, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, The Virtue of Vices, alongside Steve Almond, Alex Segura, and Cutter Wood. We spoke to Ingrid ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? Some of my earliest memories involve running down the stairs in the morning so I could snatch and smell the newspaper before anyone. I was addicted to the smell of newsprint. I remember impatiently looking at the letters, anxious to know what they said. What is your favorite line from your current work? “War always seemed distant from Bogota, like niebla descending on the hills and forests of the countryside and jungles. The way it approached us was like fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.” What is your favorite first line of a […]

Lea Carpenter is a Contributing Editor at Esquire and has written the screenplay for Mile 22, a film about CIA’s Special Activities Division, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg and John Malkovich. She is developing her first novel, Eleven Days, for television and her new novel, Red, White, Blue, is out this fall. On November 13, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Divided We Stand, alongside Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Jelani Cobb. We spoke to Lea ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? Visiting book shops, or the library, with my mother as a girl. She always gave me as much time as I wanted to make a choice and the joy of those choices is memorable. What is your favorite line from your current work? “Espionage is not a math problem.” What is your favorite first line of a novel? “What makes Iago evil?” (Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays) What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Look inward. Success is a mirage. What writer past or present do you wish you could eat dinner with? Elliot Ackerman. If he’s busy then Cormac McCarthy, Christopher Nolan, […]

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association. Her award-winning books include Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella), The Obama Victory (with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy), and the new Cyberwar. On November 13, she will be speaking at House of SpeakEasy’s Seriously Entertaining show, Divided We Stand, alongside Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lea Carpenter, and Jelani Cobb. We spoke to Kathleen ahead of the show. What is your earliest memory involving reading or writing? My mom signing the permission slip to let me check out books from the adult section of the public library in our home town when I was 8. What is your favorite line from your current work? The term “cyberwar” locates the sphere in which the attacks occurred; defines hacking, posting, impersonating, and strategic release of stolen con­tent as […]