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Whiplash directed by Damien Chazelle Sony Classics, 2014; 107 minutes A violent game of fuck-you one-upmanship, Whiplash is one of the best American movies of the year. In the red corner is Miles Teller’s Andrew Neiman, a nineteen-year-old jazz drummer with ambitions of greatness. In the blue is Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a teacher in […]
Read MoreThe Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd NY: Anchor Books, 2014; 272pp “I advise you not to hang around the Americans very much.” This friendly advice, given to the author and journalist Hooman Majd by a doorman at a hotel in Tehran, while he is […]
Read MoreIt’s funny that Middlemarch, a place name that could scarcely sound more English, should be without lexical precedent in the maps of its homeland. As Rebecca Mead informs us in her lovely book My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishing, 2014), there aren’t any other towns in England suffixed “-march.” Yet its cadence is perfect (particularly to […]
Read More“Is the theater really dead?” asked Simon & Garfunkel once upon a time. Forty-five years later, and at the height of the movies’ annual silly season, one might well ask the same of the cinema. Whither the great American movie? Whither directors of integrity and vision? Whither criticism? These are the questions David Denby poses […]
Read MoreHow far we’ve come. The House of SpeakEasy opened its doors on a snowy January night with a guest list including Uma Thurman, Andy Borowitz and Susan Orlean. Since then, we’ve featured some thirty of the best and brightest writers in the literary firmament. Tonight, two days after the summer solstice, and with temperatures firmly […]
Read MoreDo 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 […]
Read MoreIf you don’t know Bob Mankoff, reading his memoir, How About Never — Is Never Good For You?: My Life in Cartoons (Henry Holt, 2014), will be a glorious case of friends-at-first-sight. That’s his cheery cartoon self beaming out from the front cover there, and he’s welcoming you to the wittiest party in town: the world of the New […]
Read MoreWhat 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 […]
Read More“It is a lovely oddity of human nature,” observes our heroine, Katey Kontent, “that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance.” Commuting readers of Amor Towles’s debut novel, Rules of Civility, will certainly find themselves grateful for […]
Read MoreWhere 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 […]
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