Liara Tamani lives in Houston, Texas. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College. She is the author of the acclaimed Calling My Name, which was a 2018 PEN America Literary Award Finalist and a 2018 SCBWI Golden Kite Finalist, and All the Things We Never Knew. She will join Michael Ian Black, Nick Flynn, and Ian Olasov on September 22 to muse on the theme “All Good Things.” Register here to watch the show live! What are you reading right now for solace or escape? Zadie Smith’s Intimations. It’s perfect for these times. If you could live inside a fictional world, which one would you choose? Avatar Are there any quotes you use to inspire you now or anytime? Yes. My go-to quote, which is up on the wall in my study, is by the great Maya Angelou. “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style.”
Being a collection of disordered thoughts on new writing from the last year or so. There were lots of books about books. I enjoyed Rebecca Mead‘s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishing, 2014) and Joanna Rakoff‘s My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014), which both fused literary criticism and autobiography into what Joyce Carol Oates called, reviewing Mead, “bibliomemoirs.” “The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” wrote Mead of Middlemarch, locating George Eliot’s greatness in her broad imaginative sympathies. Mead’s is a lovely book, mixing biographical detail about Eliot with an introspective analysis of how her work might be read and re-read on the journey through life (review here). Rakoff’s book, meanwhile, is more straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the author’s first job in publishing, in which she became a sort of gatekeeper for J.D. Salinger. Until then, she’d not read him (“I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita”); but before long, she’s hooked. After a century of literary modernism, its central characters continue to haunt the pages of new work. Kevin Jackson‘s Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) is novelly conceived, taking 1922 day by day, dropping […]
Kate Mosse has been a major fixture on the British literary scene for two decades. In 1996 she established the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which has done great things for women writers around the world, including past winners Lionel Shriver, Marilynne Robinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith. She is also a major novelist in her own right. In the last ten years, her award-winning, bestselling Languedoc trilogy, set mostly in the south of France but across many centuries, has earned her international recognition. Last month, she was our guest at the Seriously Entertaining show “Are You For Sale?” Mosse is something of a history buff. Best known for her historical fiction, she has also written straight history (a book-length reflection on fifty years of the Chichester Festival Theatre) and many of her articles focus on her love of the genre. What most seems to inspire her is the the way in which historical artefacts can give us access to the past and to the people who live there. In an article for the Guardian in 2010, she wrote about one of her finds at a car-boot sale near Carcassonne, where she and her family spend part of the year: When I opened [the […]
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 […]
