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Posts From Author: wall street journal

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 […]

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 […]

Seriously Entertaining Gala Sets Social Pages Alight

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.” — Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice” (1923) So wrote Robert Frost in 1923, eerily prescient in his choice of imagery of this past Monday night. For inside the walls of City Winery NYC, as temperatures outside dipped into the low 20s, the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala night turned out to be a sizzling-hot celebration of writers and their art. For Page Six, the evening marked the coming-together of “a pride of literary lions”. For the House of SpeakEasy team, it marked the successful start of a series of Seriously Entertaining shows to come in the months ahead. Playing emcee for the night was comedian Andy Borowitz, creator of The Borowitz Report. In the words of Vogue: [The show] opened with writer and host Andy Borowitz regaling-slash-horrifying the legions of literary-minded folk in attendance with a tale of being asked to live-tweet the Oscars last year by an unnamed newspaper owned by “an Australian man” and turned the offer down once informed it was for no actual fee. “They said they would mention my website,” he dryly quipped. Borowitz’s elliptical anecdote laid bare one of the House of SpeakEasy’s […]