Posts From Author: are you for sale

Kate Mosse and Remaking History

Kate Mosse has been a major fixture on the British literary scene for two decades. In 1996 she established the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which has done great things for women writers around the world, including past winners Lionel Shriver, Marilynne Robinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith. She is also a major novelist in her own right. In the last ten years, her award-winning, bestselling Languedoc trilogy, set mostly in the south of France but across many centuries, has earned her international recognition. Last month, she was our guest at the Seriously Entertaining show “Are You For Sale?” Mosse is something of a history buff. Best known for her historical fiction, she has also written straight history (a book-length reflection on fifty years of the Chichester Festival Theatre) and many of her articles focus on her love of the genre. What most seems to inspire her is the the way in which historical artefacts can give us access to the past and to the people who live there. In an article for the Guardian in 2010, she wrote about one of her finds at a car-boot sale near Carcassonne, where she and her family spend part of the year: When I opened [the […]
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The Bon Mots of Michael Riedel

Nothing generates as much excitement around town as a smash hit musical. Or, if you’re a bit of a vulture (and I am), a complete fiasco wherein millions of dollars are lost, people are at one another’s throats and reputations are ruined. — Michael Riedel, in an article from September 2003 Michael Riedel was our guest at last week’s Seriously Entertaining “Are You For Sale?” at City Winery. He spoke with wit and love of the late Jacques le Sourd, a critic-colleague of his whom he had known for many years. (In)famous for his outspoken, occasionally outrageous criticism, Riedel has worked as theatre critic for the New York Post for more than 15 years. To celebrate his SpeakEasy debut, we take a look at his work in the Post and on his PBS show Theater Talk. ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ on target to kill at Tonys A recent one to kick off, covering the musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s 1994 movie Bullets Over Broadway, which is currently in previews at the St. James Theatre. Part of what makes Riedel’s work so entertaining is his acknowledgement of his own reputation. It was there in his work on the TV show Smash, whose […]
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Curtain Call: Are You For Sale?

As spring finally seems to be bursting out over a thawing Gotham, so the House of SpeakEasy is bursting with excitement about the line-up for next Tuesday’s show. It’s quite the team: writer Susan Cheever, composer/lyricist Michael Friedman, author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney, writer Kate Mosse and journalist Michael Riedel will all be answering (or maybe asking?) the question “Are You For Sale?” By way of introduction, here’s a short gallery of video gems. Susan Cheever is famous for both fiction and nonfiction. We took a look at her latest book, E.E. Cummings: A Life, last week (see here). Other biographical writings include My Name is Bill – Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous; Home Before Dark, a memoir of her father, the writer John Cheever; and American Bloomsbury, which tracks the lives of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott and their hugely influential set in the mid-nineteenth century. Her novels include A Handsome Man and Looking For Work. Here’s Cheever at the New York State Writers Institute on becoming a writer. “It was clearly not something I wanted to try and do in my family! […] And you spend most of your time worrying about paying your child’s orthodontist’s bills…” Jeff Kinney is one of the most […]
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Blog Post of a Wimpy Kid

6 March marked this year’s World Book Day in the UK, so time once again for Professor Keith Topping of the University of Dundee to publish his annual “What Kids Are Reading” report (downloadable here). It’s a fascinating atomisation of the reading habits of nearly half a million British children aged five to sixteen, one which is traditionally dominated by that great Pied Piper of children’s literature, Roald Dahl. But not this year, for it appears that the children of the UK have joined their American cousins on the spectacularly successful Diary of a Wimpy Kid bandwagon. Or should I say tour bus… To mark the publication of the eighth book in Jeff Kinney‘s terrific Wimpy Kid series, Hard Luck, the author embarked on a grand tour of the United States and Europe on this bus. It’s a big one, but after all, Greg Heffley, the middle-school hero of the series, is something of a superstar. According to the Wall Street Journal, Hard Luck sold upwards of a million copies the week it was published, from a staggering 5.5 million-book print run. In Topping’s study, the first seven volumes of the series occupied the top seven spots in the list of books most read by pupils in Year 6 […]
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“everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes”: Susan Cheever’s E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever’s new biography of E.E. Cummings (Pantheon Books, 2014), “one of the great and most important American poets”, begins with the two of them meeting. By the second half of his career Cummings had become a successful public speaker, supplementing the income he brought home with his poetry by accepting invitations to colleges and public venues across the US, and in 1958 he addressed Cheever’s girls’ school. Afterwards Cheever and her father, also a famous writer at this point, drove Cummings back to New York. He’d made quite an impression. “It wasn’t those in authority who were always right,” recalls Cheever; “it was the opposite. I saw that being right was a petty goal — being free was the thing to aim for.” Cummings’s life and work, in Cheever’s splendid book, exist in a state of constant tension between these forces of freedom and authority. Edward Estlin Cummings was born into a well-to-do family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He was well loved and received generous encouragement in his artistic development from his mother, who greatly desired a poet-son, and his uncle George, one of many influences on his early poetic development. Estlin’s was a mostly happy childhood — […]
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Jay McInerney’s The Good Life

In a 2005 article for the Guardian entitled “The uses of invention”, Jay McInerney set out to counter the prevalent concern that literature was no longer up to the task, following 9/11, of processing world events. His contribution to the proof was The Good Life (2006), a novel set in the autumn of 2001 in the bedrooms of wealthy Manhattanites dealing with the aftermath of the destruction downtown. It was McInerney’s seventh novel and a sequel of sorts to 1992’s Brightness Falls. The book’s central insight is given to Luke McGavock around halfway through: “Personally is maybe the only perspective we have.” Like much of the fiction published since 9/11, McInerney’s novel is not principally about terrorism or the fall of the World Trade Center. Instead, it examines the effects of the attacks on individuals. His characters’ lives are all balanced somewhat precariously before September 11; the subject of the book becomes how such an epochal event can change perspectives in unforeseeable ways. Luke is something of an avatar for McInerney, who also spent the weeks following 9/11 working in a soup kitchen downtown, and he is occasionally blessed with an almost authorial clairvoyance. At a benefit at Central Park Zoo: The women were beautiful in their gowns, or at least glamorous […]
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The Chronicles of Fry

Many times while reading The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry‘s bestselling memoir, I was forced to confront sadly the likelihood that the world will no longer need my autobiography. Not that he and I have lived the same life exactly. I haven’t written a dozen bestselling books or had a show on Broadway or been nominated for a Golden Globe or made a series of award-winning documentaries or presented a fantastically popular gameshow — or even published eighteen and a half thousand tweets, though at least I can realistically aim to. Nevertheless, I found myself so wholeheartedly agreeing with so many of his observations on life that anything I might have to say is now effectively redundant. We even share a passion for Ricicles. But enough about me. The Fry Chronicles, through a series of words beginning with the letter C, tells the story of Fry’s life through late adolescence and the first decade or so of his remarkable career. Cereal, candy, cigarettes, Cundall Manor School (where he briefly taught), Cambridge, coming out, [University] Challenge, The Cellar Tapes (the Footlights revue co-written by Fry that won the first Perrier Comedy Award in Edinburgh), cars, commercials, celibacy, and of course his colleague — “M’Coll” — Hugh Laurie, his best friend […]
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