Recorded: Wed, Apr 1, 2015
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
Ethiopian-born writer Dinaw Mengestu is the author of the novels How to Read the Air, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, and All Our Names. He has contributed writing to Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s, among other publications, and is the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 Award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He lives in New York City and teaches at Brooklyn College and Georgetown University.
Recorded: Wed, Mar 18, 2015
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
Lydia Davis is the author of a novel, The End of the Story, and six short story collections, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories; Break It Down, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award; and the collection Can’t and Won’t (2014). The recipient of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, awarded for an entire body of work, Davis is also a Guggenheim fellow and MacArthur genius grant winner. She has translated numerous authors from French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Foucault, and Blanchot, and teaches at the University at Albany.
Recorded: Wed, Mar 11, 2015
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels The Snow Queen, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and the PEN/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Hours, which was adapted into a major motion picture. He also penned the non-fiction work Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown and is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Cunningham lives in New York and teaches writing at Yale University.
Recorded: Wed, May 28, 2014
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Ben Greenman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
“…the book of the moment, the novel you should really read, if you haven’t already.”—The Atlantic Wire on The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer is the author of nine novels, including The Wife, The Position, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Interestings. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Wolitzer has taught creative writing at The Iowa Writers Workshop, Skidmore College, and SUNY Stony Brook Southampton. Wolitzer has served as a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier program at Princeton University.
Recorded: Wed, May 14, 2014
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Ben Greenman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
“As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs…The book delivers lightning bolts of revelation.”—The New York Times Book Review on Are You My Mother?
Alison Bechdel is the author of two bestselling graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which won an Eisner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Are You My Mother? She also wrote and drew the popular comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel was an editor of the Best American Comics series and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Vermont.
Recorded: Wed, Apr 23, 2014
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
“… a book of extraordinary power by a writer… whose own endless invention and sense of colour are already second to none.” —The Guardian (UK) on Lost City Radio
Daniel Alarcón is the author of War by Candlelight, Lost City Radio (which made the year-end “best of” lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post), and most recently, At Night We Walk in Circles. Alarcón is a co-founder of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language storytelling podcast, and his writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, n+1, and Harper’s. He was one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” and one of Granta’s “Best Young American Novelists.” He lives in San Francisco.
Recorded: Wed, Apr 9, 2014
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
” …not just a graceful writer but a deft and original thinker about the vagaries of assimilation.”—The New York Times Book Review
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.
Recorded: Wed, Feb 26, 2014
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Ben Greenman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
“A towering achievement. . .[Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review on Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Virgin Suicides; and most recently, The Marriage Plot. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and teaches creative writing at Princeton University. His work has been translated into 35 languages.
Recorded: Wed, Feb 12, 2014
at Eat, Drink & Be Literary at BAMcafe
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Presented by the National Book Foundation and Brooklyn Academy of Music
“McDermott writes the most exquisitely perceptive and atmospheric fiction published today…she nets the totality of human consciousness.”—Booklist
Alice McDermott is the National Book Award-winning author of After This, Child of My Heart, Charming Billy, At Weddings and Wakes, and, most recently, Someone (which was shortlisted for this year’s National Book Awards for Fiction). Her short stories and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Ms., The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others. McDermott is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. She teaches at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and lives with her family outside Washington, DC.
Recorded: Wed, Apr 1, 2015
Recorded: Wed, Mar 18, 2015
Recorded: Wed, Mar 11, 2015
Recorded: Wed, Apr 23, 2014
Recorded: Wed, Apr 9, 2014
Recorded: Wed, Feb 26, 2014
Recorded: Wed, Feb 12, 2014