Charles Arrowsmith | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: Charles Arrowsmith

Seriously Questioning… Jessica Strand

Jessica Strand is the host of New York Public Library’s fantastic Books at Noon series and used to coordinate Strand Book Store’s public events too, though the shared name is coincidental. She will be our guest on June 13 at the next Seriously Entertaining show, When Strangers Meet. Name: Jessica Strand Age: Between 12 and 90. Where are you from? Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. What is your occupation? Cultural programmer/interviewer. Title of most recent work: Upstairs at the Strand: Writers in Conversation at the Legendary Bookstore (Norton, 2016). What are you working on now? A poetry anthology out next spring, beginning a slim memoir on my dad [the poet Mark Strand]. What’s your earliest memory of literature? Asking my mother to take the Babar book (I can’t remember which one, but there were spirits in it) out of my bedroom when she put me to bed. There wasn’t much of a line between reality and fiction when I was four, and I was convinced that the ghoulish creatures would come out of the book and into my room. What is your petite madeleine? I’m going to answer this one with food, simpler that way — spaghetti carbonara. What do you most look forward […]

Seriously Questioning… Ayana Mathis

In Ayana Mathis‘s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf Doubleday, 2012), a young woman moves to Philadelphia after her father is murdered in Jim Crow-era Georgia. There, she has twins, but they succumb to pneumonia in infancy. The twelve tribes of the title are her dead twins, her nine other children, and one grandchild; the novel itself is a biblically inflected family saga and a powerfully moving re-creation of a dark time in American history. A masterful debut, it was a New York Times Notable Book and an Oprah selection. It’s also an excellent introduction to a major new voice in American fiction. Mathis is a professor of creative writing and a frequent contributor to The New York Times — you can read her thoughts on the most terrifying book she’s read, which subjects are underrepresented in contemporary fiction, the duties of historical fiction, and more. In Michiko Kakutani’s words, “Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own — both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters’ minds and hearts.” Name: Ayana Mathis […]

On Face Value

The Face: Cartography of the Void Chris Abani Restless Books, 2016; 96pp What do our faces say about us — and how much of what they say is fair? That’s one of the questions posed by Restless Books’s intriguing new series The Face, in which writers use their own countenances as launchpads into the imaginative stratosphere. We are promised “unique perspectives on race, culture, identity, and the human experience”, and in Chris Abani‘s Cartography of the Void, part of the series’s inaugural triptych (along with short works by Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw), we’re not disappointed. Abani is the son of an English mother and an Igbo father, and was raised in Afikpo, Nigeria. Put another way: “Biologically my face is a mix of two races, of two cultures, of two lineages.” On one side, there’s the Celt or Anglo-Saxon influence of the matrilineal line; on the other, the Egu and Ehugbo influence passed through his father. Like many people of mixed-race origin, Abani often experiences feelings of alienation depending on where he is. He’s “firmly black, of unknown origin” to Westerners, yet “not entirely African” to people in Nigeria. Everywhere he travels, he is the Other that fits: “In New Zealand I was assumed to be […]

Jon Ronson: In Search of the Genuinely New

“I suppose, being tweedy and owl-like, I just don’t look like the sort of person who normally hangs around extreme porn shoots.” This is a sentence in Jon Ronson‘s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. In his pursuit of a taxonomy of shame, Ronson finds himself on the set of a porn movie produced by the website Public Disgrace. The plot of the movie is scant: a woman is dragged into a bar, stripped, electrocuted, covered in beer, fucked. Every now and then, Ronson writes, “needing to ensure that I was accurately chronicling the minutiae of it,” he may have drifted into shot. “I just hope a few subscribers out there happen to find the image of a tweedy, owl-like journalist at an orgy stimulating, although I understand that this would be a niche quirk.” To read the rest of this interview, please head to the Literary Hub.

The Jazz of Physics: Exclusive Excerpt

The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe Stephon Alexander Basic Books, 2016; 272pp Early on in his mind-blowing new book, The Jazz of Physics, Stephon Alexander extols the virtue of analogical reasoning in theoretical physics. Fellow lay-readers of the quantum may well agree when I assert that this indeed might be the only way for many students of the theoretical to approach concepts like string theory. Alexander proves an excellent guide, revealing how the music of jazz musicians, first among them John Coltrane, have developed, in their work, a musical-imaginative extension of the theories proposed by Einstein and Pythagoras. In this exclusive excerpt, Alexander reveals the origins of his twin obsessions — jazz and physics — the guardian angels of his surprising, revelatory new book. Daniel Kaplan had been a trained master composer and a jazz baritone sax player and later was drafted to serve in the Korean War. During the war, he worked on radar technology. Consequently, Kaplan caught the physics bug and upon his return, pursued graduate studies in physics, while still playing his saxophone and composing. He would be the person that would solidify my passion to become a physicist. Kaplan was the chair […]

Revolution Begins At Home

Fun Home Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron Music by Jeanine Tesori Based on Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) by Alison Bechdel Broadway’s on a roll right now, and it’s thanks in no small part to the Public Theater. If the groundbreaking Hamilton, a sell-out success at the Public in 2015, doesn’t win Best Musical at this year’s Tonys, hats will surely be eaten. And Hamilton would make it two in a row for the Public, which also championed the breakthrough hit Fun Home. As well as taking home Best Musical last year, the show picked up awards for Best Book and Best Original Score for Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. The House of SpeakEasy is delighted to be welcoming Kron back to the Public on April 19 to talk about, among other things, her role in the creation of this extraordinary musical. The show is based on the genre-defying “family tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel, which was published in 2006 and made many of that year’s best books lists. A graphic novel, a memoir, a work of literary criticism (tackling Proust and Joyce, no less), and a landmark in LGBTQ literature, Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel’s childhood in a small Pennsylvania town and her coming out as a lesbian at […]

Amerika the Beautiful

Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin, 2015; 608pp “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” — John Jacobs of Weatherman “The challenge for me… is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.” — Bryan Burrough Five hundred pages into Bryan Burrough‘s engrossing account of America’s recent radical past, we encounter one of his revolutionary subjects standing alone in the shower saying his own name, over and over, “to remind himself who he really was”. It may have been because Raymond Luc Levasseur, who led the United Freedom Front, had amassed so many aliases (more than a dozen) that his memory was in genuine need of a jogging. But the moment also feels touched by wider existential concerns. Time and again, veterans of the radical underground, many of whose stories are told in Burrough’s book for the first time, describe the miasma of collective madness that took hold of them and convinced them of the need to blow up buildings, rob banks, and murder police officers. There are some shocking moments, when theory […]

The Eyes Have It: The Danish Girl as Book and Movie

The Danish Girl David Ebershoff Penguin, 2015 (originally published 2000); 304pp The Danish Girl Directed by Tom Hooper UK/US/Belgium, 2015; 119 minutes The eyes have it. In the recent, Academy Award-winning film version of The Danish Girl, Eddie Redmayne’s dazzled, oceanic gaze — coyly averted, abruptly direct — tells a whole story of its own. As Lili, the real-life female alter ego of artist Einar Wegener, he’s unable to look Ben Whishaw’s Henrik in the face for fear of being revealed; with his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), he can say more with a discreet eye-roll or quiver than he can with words. His eyes have an overflowing, revelatory, vulnerable quality — at times it’s like he’s naked. Redmayne, it would seem, has read David Ebershoff‘s novel very closely. First published in 2000, The Danish Girl has deservedly become a classic of trans literature for the sensitivity and perspicuity of its treatment. Although he doesn’t shy from the anatomical realities of the trans experience, Ebershoff’s greatest contribution to the genre is his depiction of Einar’s interior life. And from the very first chapter, Einar seeks respite from the difficulty of being behind his eyelids. Greta (as she’s known in the book) has asked him to put on a pair of women’s […]

Margo Jefferson’s “Negroland: A Memoir”

Negroland: A Memoir Margo Jefferson Pantheon Books, 2015; 256pp If an authentic life is what you seek, you’re basically doomed to phoniness: this is the paradox that makes “authenticity” one of those words that should only ever appear flanked by inverted commas. The desire to be “authentic” necessitates the sort of reflection that destabilizes both subject and object; neurosis, perhaps despair, that way lies. This is the inciting conundrum in Margo Jefferson’s excellent Negroland, a memoir in name but a project vastly more complex and ambitious in execution. Jefferson was raised in a well-to-do Chicago family in the 1950s and ’60s, the second daughter of a physician and a social worker-turned-socialite. She learned the piano, she took ballet lessons, she read Little Women and sang Gilbert & Sullivan. In the late ’60s and ’70s, she discovered Black Power and feminism. She became a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writing for the New York Times, Newsweek, Vogue. She’s had a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches at Columbia, she’s widely revered. Her short book On Michael Jackson, published before the singer’s death, is a luminous, empathetic re-reading of the man and his work. Yet Jefferson’s also been troubled by doubt, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts. She’s spent terrible minutes with her head in the oven pledging one day […]

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