Posts From Author: jeff kinney

Are You For Sale?

Where might you find French resistance fighters, E.E. Cummings, a Broadway critic with a freewheeling approach to life, Bessie Smith singing the blues, and a Wimpy Kid with a passion for Brazilian TV? Only at the House of SpeakEasy… Susan Cheever was first up this month, answering the evening’s main question right off the bat: “E.E. Cummings was certainly for sale!” Now acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Cummings wasn’t beneath hawking his poetry round the publishing houses back in the twenties and thirties, even dedicating one poetry collection (No Thanks) to the fourteen publishers who’d turned him down. Last month Cheever published E.E. Cummings: A Life (Pantheon), and it was from this that she took her tale for the night. Cummings had one child, Nancy, from his first marriage, to Elaine Orr. “Everything went well until Elaine fell in love with someone else — a real son of a bitch called Frank McDermott,” as Cheever recalled. Elaine annulled her marriage to Cummings and took the baby with her to Ireland to live with McDermott. “Finally, Cummings didn’t see Nancy any more. And Nancy led a kind of expat princess life, knowing absolutely nothing about her past.” Two decades later, through a series […]
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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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