Category
18 posts
“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 […]
Read MoreJ. 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, […]
Read MoreStephen 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 […]
Read MoreJessica 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 […]
Read MoreIn 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 […]
Read More“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 […]
Read MoreOn April 21, our co-founder Amanda Foreman interviewed Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts about their roles in Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd at New York’s La Grenouille. Below is a transcript of their talk. Amanda Foreman: I think the reason why we love the nineteenth-century novelists — the Brontës, the Dickenses, the […]
Read More“Event television” has been replaced by a new phenomenon in recent years, and that’s in no small part thanks to Beau Willimon. On February 1, 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of a show Willimon had (loosely) adapted from a BBC series from 1990, itself a translation of a political thriller published the year […]
Read More