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Posts From Author: city winery

One Simple Rule

After hearing from our six guest writers in April on the subject “One Simple Rule”, you might think we’d have some pretty solid advice for you. We don’t. Write what you know? Well, sometimes it’s best not to. Everyone should know CPR? Granted; hard to argue. Back up your work? Phew, yes, we’d all have saved ourselves some stress by following that one. Break all of the rules, always? We don’t like to be too prescriptive here… Well, we’ll leave you to judge, as you enjoy the wit and wisdom of Elif Shafak, Tom Rob Smith, Amber Tamblyn, Lisa Robinson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Beau Willimon. Elif Shafak was first up to the mic. An industrious author, Shafak has published several novels, numerous articles, and a collection of nonfiction. She’s a TED Talker. She’s Turkey’s most widely read female writer. She’s perplexed, then, by what she perceives to be a cult of idleness among many Middle Eastern men. “All across the Middle East, if you travel,” she said, “you will come across thousands and thousands of men — and always men — just sitting, playing backgammon, chatting — smoking, mostly — until it’s time to go home.” These men are not the subjects of her work, though. “What I’m interested in […]

Reading 2014

Being a collection of disordered thoughts on new writing from the last year or so. There were lots of books about books. I enjoyed Rebecca Mead‘s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishing, 2014) and Joanna Rakoff‘s My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014), which both fused literary criticism and autobiography into what Joyce Carol Oates called, reviewing Mead, “bibliomemoirs.” “The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” wrote Mead of Middlemarch, locating George Eliot’s greatness in her broad imaginative sympathies. Mead’s is a lovely book, mixing biographical detail about Eliot with an introspective analysis of how her work might be read and re-read on the journey through life (review here). Rakoff’s book, meanwhile, is more straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the author’s first job in publishing, in which she became a sort of gatekeeper for J.D. Salinger. Until then, she’d not read him (“I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita”); but before long, she’s hooked. After a century of literary modernism, its central characters continue to haunt the pages of new work. Kevin Jackson‘s Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) is novelly conceived, taking 1922 day by day, dropping […]

Master Your Mind with Ruby Wax

Sane New World: A User’s Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind by Ruby Wax NY: Perigee Trade, 2014; 256pp Mindfulness seems to be less a case of mind over matter than mind over emotion. In this entertaining introduction to neuroplasticity, mental illness, and coping with the tricky business of being, Ruby Wax outlines the potential benefits of employing a mindfulness-based approach to life. The Sane New World of the title is the other side of mental illness, the world beyond what can seem insurmountable to the one in four of us who live with recurring emotional difficulties. The secret? You can change your mind. Sane New World is both self-help and a personal account of life with mental illness. Wax is an American comedian who’s had a prolific career in the UK as a stand-up, script editor (for Absolutely Fabulous), interviewer (check out her program on O.J. Simpson) and TV personality. But as she points out in the early pages of her book, her busyness may not have been an entirely good thing. “You could say that multitasking has driven us mad,” she writes; “like having too many windows open on your computer, eventually it will crash.” The need to be so busy is a symptom of […]

Inside the Lie

September 29, 2014. As an amber-violet sunset spread across a CinemaScope sky to the west of Manhattan, the House of SpeakEasy returned to City Winery for the inaugural show of its fall season. Almost three hundred guests gathered to listen, to laugh, to share, and to refill their glasses as six writers — Marcelo Gleiser, Natalie Haynes, John Guare, Gary Shteyngart, Gail Sheehy, and Andrew Solomon — took to the stage to ponder this month’s theme, Inside the Lie. This month’s guest stars? Copernicus, RFK, Oedipus, Sophia Loren’s panties, an uncommon family set-up, a Bavarian porn star… We’ll be posting videos from the show soon, but here’s a sneak preview of what went down when the curtain went up… Marcelo Gleiser: “We matter because we are very rare…” Marcelo Gleiser set the scene in 1543 with the death of Copernicus. The Prussian math genius supposedly died with his newly published masterwork, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in his hands, horrified by the preface tacked on by Lutheran nay-sayer Andreas Osiander that essentially discredited all that followed. Copernicus’s theory — maybe the sun… doesn’t orbit the earth? — would of course turn the world upside down (pun). But reversing the cosmic order, especially one which […]

Big Success in Little Failure

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. — Gary Shteyngart I’m pleased to report that Gary Shteyngart’s memoir, Little Failure, in no way lives up to its title. Instead, it’s a brilliant, milk-snortingly funny ride from 1970s Leningrad through 1980s Queens to 1990s Ohio and beyond. The humour you might expect from the novelist behind The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead, 2002), Absurdistan (Random House, 2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, 2010) is all present and correct. But that’s not all. Little Failure is also a sad-funny-awkward portrait of Shteyngart’s parents, whose Russian ways and tiny failures of assimilation so acutely embarrass and enrage him while growing up. Returning with them to Russia as an adult toward the end of the book, he makes discoveries about their past, his own prehistory, that shed new light on the rest of the book’s action. Much of Little Failure concerns Gary’s difficult formative years following his emigration in 1979 (he was born in 1972). Debilitating asthma prevents his becoming athletic; in the wake of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, his Russian-ness alienates him from his Jewish schoolmates at the Solomon Schechter School […]

Curtain Call: Inside the Lie

Seriously Entertaining is back! The first of our two shows this fall, Inside the Lie, hits City Winery on Monday, September 29, with a mind-expanding line-up of literary talent. Don’t have your tickets yet? Check out our writers below in an audiovisual preview of some of the pleasures that await you. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist specializing in particle cosmology. He’s also one of the great elucidators. Gleiser’s work is remarkably accessible, cracking open the hardest nuts of quantum physics and cosmology for the general reader. Books include The Prophet and the Astronomer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which investigates the ongoing search for meaning in the stars, and, most recently, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014). Read our review of The Island of Knowledge here, follow Marcelo on Twitter, and watch his Ted Talk on the origins of life here: John Guare‘s fifty-year career on the American stage and screen has been marked by some stunning highs, including the Tony Award-winning success of The House of Blue Leaves, Louis Malle’s classic 1980 movie Atlantic City, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and, more recently, A Free Man of Color (2010). Check out our survey of […]

Elliott Kalan Has To Be Funny Every Day

Do you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? We watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Do you know who Elliott Kalan is? If not, listen up, hotshot, because Elliott is the head writer on The Daily Show! Jealous? Well, as he told Splitsider.com, “to be completely clear, objectively nothing is cooler than what I’m doing right now”. So you’re right to be. Elliott’s been in the chair since January this year, when he took over from Tim Carvell, who’d gone off to run John Oliver’s new show, Last Week Tonight (a weeklier version of the nightly news, as the ads say). He’s been working on The Daily Show for over a decade, starting as an intern in 2003. (That’s right, fellas: there’s hope! Read this great interview with Co.Create to find out Elliott’s tips for your meteoric rise…) He later became a production assistant, a segment producer, a writer… and now, head writer. Which, by and large, means that he has to be funny every day. And, presumably exponentially more difficult, make sure everyone else is funny every day. No mean feat. On the side, he’s one third of the movie-reviewing trio The Flop House (“a great listen for movie fans“, according to the New York […]

Curtain Call: The Ink Runs Dry

What happens when The Ink Runs Dry? Fortunately, the House of SpeakEasy has a talking cure. We’re delighted to welcome Jonathan Alter, David Gilbert, Christopher Mason, Jay Parini and Amanda Vaill to City Winery for another Seriously Entertaining literary cabaret, taking in tortured geniuses, presidential candidates, messiahs and more. Read on, dear friends, to meet this month’s line-up. Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, reporter, columnist, and television analyst. A veteran of nine presidential elections, his latest work has dissected the Obama White House, first in The Promise: President Obama, Year One (2010) and most recently in The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (2013), which we reviewed here. His other books include The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2007). Here Alter talks to the Washington Post about The Center Holds. “He’s very clear about needing to be president of all the people, and not the president of Black America. But he doesn’t like to talk about that too much in public… Because he’s African-American, the president can’t swing at every pitch that he wants to. Otherwise he plays into the hands of his enemies…” David Gilbert is the author of two novels, The Normals (2004) and & Sons (2013). The latter, a […]

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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