Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reads for Girls Write Now
On Friday night I’ll be introducing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she opens the last event of Girls Write Now’s Chapters series with a reading from her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. I’ve written about my admiration for her work many times; since then, she’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and earned a [...]
Marie Mockett reads at Chapters
I’ll be introducing Marie Mockett when she reads this Friday, May 21, along with the young writers of Girls Write Now, as part of our Chapters series at the Center for Fiction. Her novel, Picking Bones From Ash, was recently shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize and is concerned with the unique power and difficulties [...]
Talking with Sarah Waters uptown next month
On June 17, I’ll be talking with Sarah Waters at the Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle about her postwar haunted house story, The Little Stranger, possibly my favorite of her novels yet. It’ll be tricky (but fun) to discuss the book without giving anything away. For the uninitiated: my appreciation appeared at NPR last summer.
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Coming up: Future of criticism, and Chapters
This Saturday, April 17, I’ll be discussing the future of criticism as part of the Center for Fiction’s Conference in Honor of Roger Shattuck. Other participants in the panel discussion are Granta editor John Freeman and New Republic critic Jed Perl, and it will be moderated by National Book Critics Circle President Jane Ciabattari. I’m [...]
LaValle, Mun, Birkerts: My next two weeks
I can’t wait till next Monday, March 22, when I’ll talk with my friend Victor LaValle at Greenlight Books about his latest novel (Big Machine), his previous work, and race, madness, religion, and more. It’ll be kind of like getting some pints together, except without the slurring or frequent use of “fucking” as a modifier. [...]
Brooklyn Book Fest: Literature in a digital age
A friend who heard my soundbite on WNYC earlier wanted details on the Literature in a Digital Age panel I’m moderating tomorrow at the Brooklyn Book Festival, so I thought I’d post them here, too.
The panelists are John Freeman, Dwight Garner, and Sarah Schmelling. Given the topic, it should be a fun, wide-ranging discussion [...]
My final Four-Letter Word reading
I’m reading one last time from Conversations You Have at Twenty, my Love is a Four-Letter Word contribution, at Cornelia Street Cafe tonight (9/1) with D.E. Rasso, Emily Flake, and Michelle Green. Russ Marshalek hosts, and we get started at 6 p.m.
(In remembrance of the last time D.E. and [...]
Love is a Four Letter Word events
Later this month and a couple times in the weeks following I’ll be reading from “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” my contribution to Love is a Four-Letter Word.
Today at Paper Cuts, Gregory Cowles calls the anthology “pretty irresistible.” A “lot of it has to do with the tone,” he says. “[T]he usual regret, shame [...]
Talking with Kate Christensen about Trouble tonight
It’ll be raining for the next week anyway, so why not brave the G train and the weather tonight, and come out to celebrate the publication of the amazing Kate Christensen’s Trouble, with some sangria and salsa at WORD?
She’ll read, and I’ll interview her briefly, and it might even be more fun than [...]
Trouble in Greenpoint on Thursday, the 18th
Next Thursday night I’ll be drinking sangria, eating sorbet, and interviewing Kate Christensen — first idol, now friend — about Trouble, at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, at 7:30 p.m. She calls this novel, her fifth, her beach book. I devoured it over the winter almost as quickly as I did the others, except [...]
Where I’ll be tonight
Upcoming events at Housing Works: April 15 and May 1
Lauren posted two weeks’ worth of events last Monday, so, in lieu of a new Smart Set, here are a couple of things I’m up to in the next month and a half.
Readings from New Work: On April 15, I and my friends Lizzie Skurnick and Kate Christensen are doing short readings from new work [...]
Talking blogging & the arts with Bérubé at Penn State
I’m Penn State today (2/9) to discuss blogging and the arts with the great Michael Bérubé — American literature and cultural studies professor, and blogger — as part of the university’s Arts in Public Life series. We start at 12:30. If you’re in town, it’d be great [...]
Stories of my worst holidays — and yours
I’d hoped to write about my worst Christmas Eve* ever, but the Great Big Lump of Coal reading I’m doing at the Good Words at Good World series this Sunday is coming up so soon, I won’t have time to do that. Fortunately, there are plenty of other bad [...]
Witches, Demons, & Thieves: A Puritan Halloween
If you’re free on October 22, come out to Housing Works at 7 p.m. for Witches, Demons, and Thieves, a Puritan Halloween celebration with authors Kathleen Kent and Hannah Tinti, and artist Michael Aaron Lee, a friend whose eerie tree paintings (pictured) evoke the cold, dark forest of the soul that Hawthorne’s Young Goodman [...]
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