Posts From Author: slate
Writers and Storytelling: Rebecca Onion
Rebecca Onion lives in Athens, Ohio, and writes about culture, history, family, and (sometimes) food for magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. She is currently a staff writer for Slate.com. She has also written for Aeon Magazine, the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic‘s website, Topic Magazine, the Austin-American Statesman, PBS’ American Experience website, and others. Rebecca holds a Ph.D and an MA in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in American Studies from Yale University. Her book, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. She will be joining Mike Soto, Merrill Markoe, and Aaron Hutcherson on November 17 to tell stories tied to the theme “Up in Smoke.” Register here for the show! What are you reading right now for solace or escape? Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis – this is a Hugo-winning novel from 1992 that’s about time-traveling historians who mistakenly send a student back to the time of the Black Death. (Your definition of “solace or escape” may vary!) If you could live inside a fictional world, which one would you choose? […]
Read MoreDana Vachon’s Mergers & Acquisitions
The advent of Dana Vachon on the American literary scene in 2007, with his novel Mergers & Acquisitions (Riverhead, 2007), was a case of spooky synchronicity. His satirical debut novel, a tale of gross financial incompetence and Caligulan excess, may not have explicitly foretold the financial collapse of 2007 and 2008, but with hindsight it certainly had a prophetic air. The book opens at the engagement party for Lauren Schuyler and Roger Thorne, friends of protagonist Tommy Quinn. It takes place at the New York Racquet & Tennis Club on Park Avenue, “the most prosperous street in the most prosperous city in the most prosperous nation that ever lived”. This fairytale cadence sets the tone nicely for a steady procession of grotesques, high-society scrapes, and reversals of fortune. We’re in Bonfire of the Vanities territory here, a world stuck on caps lock characterised by unbelievable quantities of money, unforgivable lapses of basic ethics, and a generation of young men way, way out of their depth. Having narrowly made it onto the graduate programme at J.S. Spenser & Co., Tommy finds he has to work much harder than his friend Roger, who, being rather more to the manner born, has a natural aristocratic style that seems to […]
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