Posts From Author: Interviews

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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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.
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Sheep-dipping, singing, and feminism with Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts

On 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 Hardys, the George Eliots of this world — is because they both give us these traditional truths about humanity, and yet they also dissect them, they eviscerate them. The premise of Far From the Madding Crowd is very simple. It’s about love, it’s about betrayal, and it’s about money. These are eternal concepts. They revolve around a young woman named Bathsheba Everdene, who is a young country girl who suddenly comes into a great deal of money. With that independence comes not the freedom she thought she was going to have, because she is surrounded by three male antagonist-protagonists. And it’s her visceral struggle for independence vis-à-vis these three men. Because it’s about Bathsheba, I’m going to start with Carey Mulligan, who plays Bathsheba. I must say, you’re currently also playing a role in David Hare’s Skylight, about a woman who refuses to be defined by the men […]
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Building a House of Cards: An Interview with Beau Willimon

“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 before. Gone, though, was Ian Richardson’s uppity Chief Whip, his lapine poise and aristocratic camp. Gone were the Whitehall setting and the early-’90s sexual mores. In their place, the cool, adult style of David Fincher; the Jacobean viciousness of politics inside the Beltway; the Southern camp of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood. The show was House of Cards; the rest, as they say… Beau Willimon very kindly agreed to answer your questions. So with many thanks to our readers for sending them in, please find below his (declassified) responses. Read on to find out why Underwood couldn’t have been a Republican, how comedy plays into House of Cards, and what Frank advice might look like. Ryan Merola: How did you decide that making Underwood a Blue Dog Democrat from South Carolina would be both a fair analogy to the original British villain-protagonist as well as a good avenue for making your […]
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