Events

On Biography is a conversation and reading series devoted to the craft of biography. Host Rachel Syme will speak to leaders and emerging stars of the biography world, discussing the thrills and challenges of writing about a life. This series will explore the ethics of reading personal letters and diaries, the controversies that come with writing someone else's story, and the excitement of uncovering a treasure in the archives. Rachel will talk with Stacy Schiff.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions. Her latest book is Cleopatra, a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

Rachel Syme is the former Books Editor for National Public Radio and a current NPR contributor and contributing culture editor for TIME Magazine. She is currently writing a biography of the love affair between Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and author F. Scott Fitzgerald for Random House. She has read so many biographies that she often feels like she is living a hundred other lives in addition to her own.

David Grann says: "Every once in a while that rare book comes along that is not only wonderfully written and utterly compelling but also alters the way you perceive the world. Toby Lester’s Da Vinci's Ghost is such a book. Like a detective, Lester uncovers the secrets of an iconic drawing and pieces together a magisterial history of art and ideas and beauty." The author will be in conversation with Robert Krulwich, co-host of RadioLab and Science Correspondent for NPR.

Please note: due to unfortunate circumstances, this event has been canceled.

Know that classic novel you absolutely should have read by this point in your life? It's time to alleviate your nagging guilt with Ask Me About..., a Time Out New York and McNally Jackson event that's part book club, part lecture series, part show and part social occasion. In February we'll tackle Lydia Davis' translation of Madame Bovary. Hosted by TONY's Books editor Matthew Love, the free event is held downstairs at McNally Jackson. Writers and public figures who are passionate about the chosen classic will deliver introductory lectures. The crowd will be divided into groups for part of the evening, and given different aspects of the text to discuss. Actors will put on short, silly scenes which illustrate crucial moments of the plot; musicians and poets will present works based on the work in question. Once the presentations are over, participants will hang around, drink, talk about the book at length and offer suggestions for the next novel.



RSVP to askmeaboutbookclub@gmail.com, pick up a copy of Madame Bovary, READ IT and then show up at McNally Jackson on 2/28 at 7pm.

 We'll be selling copies of the new Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary at a ten percent discount.

Our guest lecturers for this Ask Me About... are publicist extraordinaire Lauren Cerand and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham.

Join Ellah Allfrey, James Marcus and Deborah Treisman - editors from Granta, Harper's and The New Yorker - as they discuss how and why and what they publish. The proverbial slush pile; the writers they're loving; the ones that got away. Tonight they'll talk about what goes on behind the curtain. Granta editor John Freeman will moderate.

Norumbega Park--by Anthony Giardina, the critically acclaimed author of White Guys--is about class and parental dreams, sex and spirituality, the way visions conflict with stubborn reality, and a family's ability to open up for others a world they can never fully grasp for themselves. Anthony Giardina will be in conversation with playwright and novelist David Rabe.

Book Signing and Launch event for Dan Graham’s New Jersey. Panelists include:

• Dan Graham
• Craig Buckley
• Mark Wasiuta
• Mark Wigley 
• Lars Muller

Dan Graham’s New Jersey is the first book to compile Graham’s photographs of New Jersey from 1966 to the present. Collecting the original photographs from Graham’s iconic Homes for America series, Dan Graham’s New Jersey pairs these with new photographs taken in the context of a study trip with the architecture faculty of Columbia University. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the older ones, taken in the same suburban locations that Graham photographed in the 1960s. The juxtaposition creates a fascinating play of repetitions and differences that raise questions regarding the future of architecture, suburbia, and public space. With essays by Mark Wasiuta and Mark Wigley.

This is a free article writing workshop with Jennifer Armstrong. She is the co-founder and editor of SexyFeminist.com, and co-author of the nonfiction book The Feminist Bombshell (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and author of the nonfiction book Why? Because We Still Like You (Grand Central Publishing). She served as senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, and she has written for Glamour, Salon, Writer's Digest, and numerous daily newspapers, and her work is included in the anthologies Altared and Coffee At Luke's.

Sheila Heti says "In The Guardians, Manguso holds up two kinds of love: the love for someone willfully at one's side (the new husband) and the love for someone willfully gone (the dear friend, a suicide). The limitations and complexities of romantic love played out in the present are here haunted on all sides by the simple expansiveness of platonic love, especially as seen through the lens of mourning. The living cannot compete with the dead. But marriage has its rights before any friendship. The mystery of where Manguso's heart will land propels us through this vivid meditation." Sarah Manguso will be in conversation with Lorin Stein, Editor of The Paris Review.  
 

Please note: this event has been canceled.

The Los Angeles Times says: “If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick deWitt’s bloody, darkly funny western The Sisters Brothers...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.” Patrick deWitt will be in conversation with Andy Hunter of Electric Literature.

Please note: this is a ticketed event at the Center for Architecture.

Guy Gugliotta will present his book Freedom's Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War.

The modern United States Capitol is a triumph of both engineering and design. From the nine million pound cast-iron dome to the dazzling opulence of the President’s Room and the Senate corridors, the Capitol is one of the most renowned buildings in the world. But the history of the modern U.S. Capitol is also the history of America’s most tumultuous years. As the new Capitol rose above Washington’s skyline, battles over slavery and secession ripped the country apart. Ground was broken just months after Congress adopted the compromise of 1850, which was supposed to settle the “slavery question” for all time. The statue of Freedom was placed atop the Capitol's new dome in 1863, five months after the Battle of Gettysburg.

In Freedom’s Cap, the award-winning journalist Guy Gugliotta recounts the history and the broader meaning of the Capitol building through the lives of the three men most responsible for its construction. We owe the building’s scale and magnificence to none other than Jefferson Davis, who remained the Capitol’s staunchest advocate up until the week he left Washington to become president of the Confederacy. Davis’s protégé and the Capitol’s lead engineer, the Army Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, became Quartermaster General of the Union Army and never forgave Davis his betrayal of the nation. The Capitol’s brilliant architect and Meigs’s longtime rival, Thomas U. Walter, defended slavery at the beginning of the war, but eventually turned fiercely against the South. In impeccable detail, Gugliotta captures the clash of personalities behind the building of the Capitol and the unique engineering, architectural, design and political challenges the three men collectively overcame to create the iconic seat of American government.

Guy Gugliotta covered Congress for The Washington Post for six years and for the last five years has been a freelance writer. He has written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, Discover, and Smithsonian. He is the coauthor of Kings of Cocaine.

Cost:
Free for AIA members
$10 for non-members - PURCHASE A TICKET

Please note: this event was originally scheduled for February 27th.

In Ten Thousand Saints, young punk Jude navigates the hardcore scene of the 80s Lower East Side. A fierce and heartfelt coming-of-age story, the book, now in paperback, was named one of the ten best of 2011 by The New York Times. Henderson will be in conversation with Taylor Antrim, fiction critic for The Daily Beast.

Real Characters is a monthly storytelling and performance show that combines some of New York’s best storytellers with its funniest, most innovative comedians and writers. So, some of it’s true, some of it feels more than true, and most of it is mostly funny. Past performers include writers, journalists, actors, stand-ups and 1950s housewives, who have appeared on the Moth Mainstage, This American Life, BBC’s The World, HBO’s Funny or Die and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Joining us in March: 

• Mike Doughty (musician, author of The Book of Drugs)
• Simon Doonan (Creative Ambassador-at-Large of Barney's, author of Gay Men Don't Get Fat)
• Jullianne Smolinski (GQ, xojane, twitter's @boobsradley)
• Steve Zimmer (The Moth Podcast)
• Colin Nissan (McSweeney's, The Paris Review)

The Bridge is a reading series devoted to literary translation. It aims to promote literature in translation by serving as a venue for readings by well-established and emerging translators and authors. This time, Michael Emmerich and Ted Goossen join us to discuss their work translating from the Japanese.  

Michael Emmerich has translated novels by Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Rieko Matsuura, and Yasunari Kawabata, as well as editing and translating two collections of contemporary Japanese short stories, Short Stories in Japanese (Penguin, 2011) and Read Real Japanese Fiction (Kodansha, 2008). He received the 2010 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for a Translation of Japanese Literature, for his translation of Hiromi Kawakami's Manazuru. He is currently assistant professor of Premodern Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, where his research is focused on translations of The Tale of Genji.

Ted Goossen is a translator and professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literature at York University, Canada. He has translated a number of Japanese writers, including Naoya Shiga, Masuji Ibuse, and Haruki Murakami. With Motoyuki Shibata, he edits Monkey Business, a journal of new writing from Japan which has recently featured an interview with Haruki Murakami, a new story from Yoko Ogawa, manga by the Brother and Sister Nishioka, and much more. 



David Mitchell says Gods Without Men is "a beautifully written echo chamber of a novel." And The Independent says "This really is Kunzru’s great American novel." We can't recommend this book highly enough. Hari Kunzru will be in conversation with James Surowiecki, staff writer for The New Yorker and writer of The Financial Page in the magazine.

Richard Russo says of Lauren Groff's new novel: "Richly peopled and ambitious and oh, so lovely, Lauren Groff's Arcadia is one of the most moving and satisfying novels I've read in a long time. It's not possible to write any better without showing off."

And Jill McCorkle says of Megan Mayhew Bergman's book: "A big-hearted collection of stories--each one a precise and compassionate study of human life, the changes and obstacles--all carefully housed under the miracles and marvels of nature. Megan Mayhew Bergman is a brilliantly gifted writer who recognizes and highlights life's fragilities in a way that will leave your heart aching while also finding those bits of hilarity and absurdity that bring uniqueness to each and every creature."

Publishers Weekly gave Jeanette Winterson's new book a starred review, and said "Raw . . . A highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and endearing memoir."

Jeanette Winterson's bold and revelatory novels have earned her widespread acclaim, establishing her as a major figure in literature today. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally best-selling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents.

Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging-for love, identity, home, and a mother.