Posts From Author: Charles Arrowsmith

Seriously Questioning… Richard Cohen

In How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers (Random House, 2016), Richard Cohen shares with readers the magpied loot of a lifetime of reading. Packed with examples from the best of world literature and interspersed with anecdotes from his one-time day job as an editor (he’s worked with Fay Weldon, Kingsley Amis, Simon Winchester, Madeleine Albright, Rudy Giuliani, John le Carré…), it’s a hugely entertaining book and one that’ll send you straight to your local library to fill in the gaps in your own reading. The first rule of Write Club seems to be that there are no rules. Every writer’s approach is different. Take the creation of characters: some let their characters guide the plot, some let them serve it; one writer may interview their characters, another will barely define them. While Dostoyevsky may have worried brilliantly over the naming of Raskolnikov, Alistair MacLean was so untaken with the importance of names that he allowed Cohen to change those of minor characters sight unseen. Cohen shares his insights into beginnings and endings, not to mention his foray into the Literary Review‘s “Bad Sex in Fiction” archives. (Who writes sex well? you might ask. “Recently I’ve been reading Elena Ferrante,” Cohen remarked in a chat […]
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Agnus Dei

Sweet Lamb of Heaven Lydia Millet W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; 256pp Here’s our set-up. After the birth of Anna and Ned’s child, a “ragged, uninvited disruption” enters Anna’s life: she starts to hear voices. Ned is distant — he’d not wanted to go through with the pregnancy anyway — and Anna is left alone to ponder this phenomenon. She watches a lot of horror movies, she spends her nights on Wikipedia. All the time, she’s beset by a “torrent of sound and image”, a “stream of convolved murmurings”. During this period, Ned becomes increasingly remote — he’s unfaithful, and his interest in entering Alaskan politics grows. Then one day, the voices stop. Anna takes Lena, their daughter, and abandons Ned. They travel the country, evading Ned’s attempts to reach them, and eventually wind up living in a motel atop a cliff in Maine, some two hours’ drive from Portland. There, Anna and Lena (now six) get to know Don, the motel’s proprietor, and his other guests, each of whom has also heard voices. “If I had been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five,” she writes, “some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know […]
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Seriously Questioning… Madeleine Thien

Last month, Madeleine Thien‘s third novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Do Not Say We Have Nothing (W.W. Norton), which is set in both present-day Vancouver and the China of Mao and Tiananmen Square, captivates from its opening paragraph: “In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.” The book’s structure allows Thien’s considerable talent free rein, as stories within stories proliferate and she hops nimbly between countries and time periods. “To write a novel is to find many other ways of being alive,” she told the Guardian last week; reading this marvelously rich book, you’ll believe that to read a novel might afford the same opportunities. The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced on the evening of Thursday, October 25, and Madeleine will join House of SpeakEasy at its next Seriously Entertaining show, Razor’s Edge, in New York City on November 1. Before then, we spoke to her about art, Johann Sebastian Bach, and discovering literature. Name: Madeleine Thien Age: 42 Where are you from? Montreal, by way of Vancouver. What is your occupation? Words, sentences and time travel. Title […]
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Seriously Questioning… James Rebanks

“Thousand shades of grey”. Picture from James Rebanks’s hugely popular Twitter feed, @herdyshepherd1. “When English people dream of a rural arcadia, they usually dream of our landscape,” writes James Rebanks in The Shepherd’s View, just published as an attractive, colorful hardback by Flatiron Books. His latest account of farm life in the Lake District is a photo-filled follow-up to the New York Times best-seller The Shepherd’s Life, and every bit as funny, as plainspoken, as gripping, and as suddenly, unexpectedly moving. Rebanks, who combines the poetic eye of Wordsworth with a distinctly English wit (and an iPhone camera), turns the material of his everyday existence as a shepherd into a powerful chronicle of twenty-first century rural life. With understated affection and deadpan humor, he describes both his neighbors and his dogs (guess whom he favors), as well as the ins and outs of livestock shows (“They need to be stylish with good lines and curves. Think shapely, like Beyoncé”). Before his appearance at the House of SpeakEasy on November 1, we spoke about bookishness, Ernest Hemingway, and the sheep that’ll probably outlive us all. Name: James Rebanks Age: 42 Where are you from? Matterdale, Cumbria, England. What is your occupation? Shepherd and writer. Title of most recent work: The […]
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“Oh Beauty, You Are the Light of the World!”

The Light of the World: A Memoir Elizabeth Alexander Grand Central Publishing, 2015; 240pp Elizabeth Alexander‘s lovely, sad memoir is a tale of two thunderbolts. The first: love at first sight — “A torque inside my stomach, the science of love” — between Alexander and her husband-to-be, the Eritrean artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. The second: Ficre’s sudden death, at the age of fifty, at their home in Connecticut. Alexander’s passage through grief to life on the other side is at once harrowing and hopeful: while her writing eloquently captures the essential terror of death, it also shows how life and literature might be talismans against despair. It’s a book that will stop you in your tracks. Its fragmentary genesis and structure, which Alexander writes about in an afterword, surely reflect the haphazardness of grief, the slow shape-taking of the narratives we create to make sense of what happens to us. “The story seems to begin with catastrophe,” she writes, “but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story.” Of course, giving literary shape to life may indeed lend a love story a tragic arc, and so it is here that small details and shared experiences — little regrets, the three dozen […]
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The Eye of the Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann Random House, 2015; 256pp The first words we read in Colum McCann’s 2015 collection of stories are Wallace Stevens’s: “Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” provides the epigraphs for each of the short chapters in McCann’s title story, and an oblique way in to understanding its philosophical intricacies. Its haiku-like fragments dictate the reader’s focus in ways that are continually refreshing and unexpected: “The river is moving,” he writes; “The blackbird must be flying.” “When the blackbird flew out of sight / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” In the same way that Stevens’s blackbird is often just glimpsed, the tiniest of details in the vastness of nature, so McCann draws attention to the poetic detail at the edge of the frame, the impulse or act that might hold the key to explaining a significant event. The event in question is the apparently random murder of an 82-year-old judge yards from his home on the Upper East Side. The story, suspended between the judge’s interior life and the geometry of his murder, captured obliquely […]
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Seriously Questioning… Alexander Chee

“A more impressive, richly imagined novel I have not read in many years,” wrote Lauren Elkin in the Financial Times. “A book that I look forward to rereading, savoring, studying for my own novelistic purposes:” Sonya Chung over at The Millions. From fellow authors, too: “One doesn’t so much read Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night as one is bewitched by it” (Hanya Yanagihara). Chee’s second novel — which follows Edinburgh (2001), a Whiting Award (2003), the inauguration of his “Dear Reader” series at Ace Hotel, and essays and stories for everywhere from The New York Times Book Review to Out — has drawn wide praise indeed. We’re delighted to be welcoming Alexander to the first show in our fall season on September 20. But before then, we had a few questions for the man himself. Name: Alexander Chee. Age: As old as you need me to be. Where are you from? The great state of Maine, by way of Korea, Guam and Truk. What is your occupation? Writer. Title of most recent work: The Queen of the Night. What are you working on now? A short story about a little girl who runs away from her home on Mars. If you had to paint a […]
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Seriously Questioning… J. Michael Straczynski

J. Michael Straczynski is a screenwriter, television polymath, comic book writer, and novelist, and one of four speakers at our next Seriously Entertaining show, This Is Not the End, on September 20. Prolific doesn’t really cover his output. Indeed, the 34 writing credits on his IMDb page only hint at the extraordinary range and volume of his work, which includes the vast majority of Babylon 5‘s 110 episodes (he created the show), the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Changeling (for which he was nominated for a BAFTA), zombie-apocalypse epic World War Z, seven instalments of Murder She Wrote, and, alongside co-creators the Wachowskis, the entirety of last year’s Sense8, one of Netflix’s most ambitious and successful original productions. Ahead of September’s show, we spoke to Joe about getting drunk with Nixon, the length of the working day, and why Peter O’Toole would be the ideal candidate to record his collected works. Name: J. Michael Straczynski. My friends call me Joe. People who don’t like me also call me Joe. I find this vaguely disquieting. Age: Physically: 62. Intellectually: mid-30s. Emotionally: a very shy 12. (There won’t be any girls reading this, will there?) Where are you from? Technically I was born in Paterson, NJ, but my father was a notorious deadbeat […]
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Seriously Questioning… Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt is a poet, critic, and professor of English at Harvard. In 2009, his guide to reading contemporary poetry, Close Calls With Nonsense, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent poetry collection, Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013) is a brilliant sequence of surprising, absurdist, sexually supple verse, flush with the joys of parenthood, adventurous in its versification, unafraid of living and loving. There’s a poem about the Muppets. One’s titled “For Avril Lavigne”. Another is told from the perspective of your standard office stapler (“I have no use for a doctrine of non- / attachment, although I once / put an argument for it together”). Stephen is one of the guests at our Seriously Entertaining show When Strangers Meet at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on June 13. Name: Stephen Burt. Steph, in person. Sometimes also Stephanie. Age: 45, perhaps alas. Where are you from? Washington, DC. Childhood in the Maryland suburbs, but really, DC. What is your occupation? I’m a college professor. I teach people how to read and talk about poetry, except when I am teaching them how to read and talk about comic books. Title of most recent work: The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read […]
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