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Alexander Pope recited in the style of William Shatner. A French general, born into slavery in Saint-Domingue, locked in a war of attrition with Napoleon Bonaparte. A live link to Hollywood during Oscars week. It could only be the House of SpeakEasy. “This Is Not A Man” delivered another Seriously Entertaining mix of music, comedy, history […]
Read MoreWe’re just days away from our February show, “This Is Not a Man”. Speechless with excitement, it seems only right that we hand over to our six guests to introduce themselves. So without further ado… Tom Reiss won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for his latest book, The Black Count: […]
Read MoreSusan Minot’s latest book, Thirty Girls (Knopf, 2014), is her first novel in over a decade and a significant departure from her earlier work. The girls of the title are the real-life prisoners of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda captured from their convent school in 1996. Five died in captivity, and the last to escape returned […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreAnton Sword is a romantic of the old school. His Twitter profile describes him as a songwriter and flaneur from “Brooklyn and sometimes Berlin”. His first album, A Sentimental Education (2007), shares its title with a nineteenth-century French novel. His song titles include “On the Precipice”, “Behind the Scarlet Curtain”, and “City of Oblivion”. All this lavish, sublime, Baudelairean-Flaubertian […]
Read MoreJANE I think what they did to you was evil. PHILOMENA No I don’t like that word. MARTIN No — evil’s good. (They stare at him) Story wise. You can read Philomena: A Screenplay by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, based on the book by Martin Sixsmith, on the Weinstein Company website here. As with most published screenplays, there are […]
Read More“To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas,” writes Tom Reiss in the opening pages of his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Black Count (Crown, 2012). “The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget.” It’s a sin Reiss cannot be accused of, for The Black Count is above all an act of memorial. Alex […]
Read MoreIn 1991 the New York Times marked the “earth-shattering news” that Pauline Kael was retiring by interviewing her. The great iconoclast of film criticism, whose put-downs made her unpopular with publicists but delighted readers of the New Yorker for more than twenty years, nevertheless found much to admire in the latest crop of Hollywood stars. She listed among her […]
Read MoreDar Williams, who is our special musical guest at the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery, has more than twenty years of recording and performing to her name. Described by the New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg as “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters“, Dar’s back catalogue includes nine studio albums, two live albums, a handful of […]
Read MoreOne of the most exciting things about the launch of the House of SpeakEasy (on January 27 — get your tickets here) is where it’s happening. City Winery, for those of you who haven’t been, kinda requires a new word to describe it: it’s at once winery, restaurant and concert venue. Whatever you call it, though, those […]
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