Big Table

In Evelyn McDonnell's The World According to Joan Didion, readers will find an intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of the revered and influential writer Joan Didion. As a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, Didion was a writer's writer—a keen observer of life's telling little details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging a close observation of the world by unsentimental critics and meticulous stylists. McDonnell is an acclaimed journalist, essayist, and critic herself. A native Californian, feminist, and university professor, she regularly teaches Didion's work and thus is well able to interpret her legacy for readers today. Inspired by Didion's own words—from both published and unpublished works—and informed by the people who knew Didion and whose lives she helped shape, The World According to Joan Didion traces the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as seen through Didion's eyes and explores her work in chapters keyed to the singular physical motifs of her writing: Snake. Typewriter. Hotel. Notebook. Girl. Etc. Hat & Beard editor and fellow traveler Vivien Goldman introduced me to McDonnell's work a decade ago. Being a big Didion head myself, I couldn't wait to talk to McDonnell about this smart, elegant, and undeniably readable biography—the first published since Joan's death in December of 2021.

We have a special edition of The Big Table Podcast on today's episode. Presenting Adaptation, the inaugural event of a new literary salon series and collaboration between USC's Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab and Soho House. Adaptation will feature conversations between writers and screenwriters discussing the art of adapting books into TV and film. Up first, the Oscar-winning writer-director Cord Jefferson and the USC distinguished professor and novelist Percival Everett. Jefferson adapted Everett's novel Erasure into the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, which opened in December 2023. Jefferson went on to win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay a few days after this conversation was recorded. On the episode, Jefferson and Everett discuss the process of taking an experimental and innovative text like Erasure and turning it into something that honors the new form while staying true to the spirit of the original work. This is an initiative of Danzy Senna in collaboration with curator Margot Ross. We thank them both for including us in this incredible new series and for the opportunity to preserve these valuable conversations for posterity. It was a magical night in an intimate room and so we are very glad to be able to share it with a wider audience. MUSIC “I Didn't Know About You” by Thelonious Monk Composed by Bob Russell & Duke Ellington Performed by Thelonious Monk, Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, Ben Riley

Prudence Peiffer's first book, The Slip, is the never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there. For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a cluster of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Delphine Seyrig, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community of unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art. Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the impact their work had on the direction of late 20th-century art and film. This remarkable biography questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip's eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Despite Coenties Slip's obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—it was one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city's maritime industry; and, in the artists' own time, a development battleground for people like Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. I caught up with Peiffer, in the Fall of 2023 where she unpacked this group portrait, one of my favorite books of the year. Listen to hear Prudence Peiffer discuss the history of Coenties Slip.

As we prime our book club model for post-COVID growth, we are programming a couple of longer late-summer episodes about our own books via Hat & Beard Press. To support Big Table or Hat & Beard, join our book clubs. You can find out more about them at hatandbeard.com. Your support fuels our books, podcasts, exhibitions, and events, and we thank you. On today's episode of Big Table, we've recorded a long-form conversation between our own Mandy Kahn and Dana Gioia, both accomplished poets. Masters of traditional lyrical forms and natives of Los Angeles, they are both also currently out with new books: Holy Doors, Mandy's third collection, is one of the first titles on our Hat & Beard Editions imprint. Meanwhile, Mr. Gioia has published, collected, or translated dozens of books throughout his storied career, which includes a stint as the director of the NEA and poet laureate of California. His most recent collection is Meet Me at the Lighthouse (Graywolf Press, 2023). Both are available now. This episode is more free form, with both poets reading from their work in dialogue with one another as they discuss their craft. Please enjoy Mandy Kahn in conversation with Dana Gioia discussing their new books and a whole lot more.

File Under: Slime by Christopher Michlig — a cultural history of Slime — was recently published by Hat & Beard Editions. What is slime? We are well acquainted with its qualities in conjunction with certain things from which we tend to recoil but to which we are also at times attracted. Despite being everywhere, slime is a surprisingly unexamined cultural phenomenon. File Under: Slime collates a cultural history of “slime” and “sliminess,” with particular emphasis on precedents in pop-culture, contemporary art, ecology, science fiction, literature, critical theory, and cinema. Artist and professor Christopher Michlig's research characterizes slime as a pervasive, oozing, cultural phenomenon, documenting instances of its evolving representations. The appearance of slime in such films as The Blob, Ghostbusters, and Poltergeist are diligently and humorously analyzed, commercial and graphic design precedents are incorporated, and the work of such artists as Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman, Robert Smithson, Sterling Ruby, and Jason Rhoades are discussed. Alongside a multitude of visual references, File Under: Slime is supplemented with literary and theoretical references from such writers as Jean Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Mike Kelley, Rosalind Krauss, Laura Mulvey, and others. +++ SLIME: A NATURAL HISTORY by SUSANNE WEDLICH — a different but like-minded cultural history of slime — was also recently published by Melville House in New York. This groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out. Slime exists at the interfaces of all things: between the organs and layers in our bodies, and between the earth, water, and air in the world, and is often produced in the fatal encounter between predator and prey. In this fascinating, ground-breaking book, Wedlich leads us on a scientific journey through the 3-billion-year history of slime—from the part it played in the evolution of life on this planet to the way it might feature in the post-human future. She also explores the cultural and emotional significance of slime, from its starring role in the horror genre to its subtle influence on Art Nouveau. +++ Susanne Wedlich studied biology and political science in Munich and has worked as a writer in Boston and Singapore. She is currently a freelance science journalist for Der Spiegel and National Geographic. She lives in Munich. Christopher Michlig, meanwhile, makes work in a wide range of media, including collage, printmaking, sculpture, and film. His work has been reviewed and featured in The Los Angeles Times, Mousse Magazine, Saatchi Online, Flavorpill, and New City and exhibited nationally and internationally.  Michlig received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California and he is currently Associate Professor and area Coordinator of Core Studio at the University of Oregon, Eugene. The authors caught up this spring to discuss their books and mutual fascination with slime.

For Big Table episode 51, editors Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker discuss their latest book, Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter.  Is there a “Rosebud” object in your past? A long-vanished thing that lingers in your memory—whether you want it to or not? As much as we may treasure the stuff we own, perhaps just as significant are the objects we have, in one way or another, lost. What is it about these bygone objects? Why do they continue to haunt us long after they've vanished from our lives? In Lost Objects, editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker have gathered answers to those questions in the form of 50 true stories from a dazzling roster of writers, artists, thinkers, and storytellers, including Lucy Sante, Ben Katchor, Lydia Millet, Neil LaBute, Laura Lippman, Geoff Manaugh, Paola Antonelli, and Margaret Wertheim to name just a few. Each spins a unique narrative that tells a personal tale, and dives into the meaning of objects that remain present to us emotionally, even after they have physically disappeared. While we may never recover this Rosebud, Lost Objects will teach us something new about why it mattered in the first place—and matters still. For the readings this episode, two authors read their essays from the book: First up, Lucy Sante discusses her long lost club chair; and Mandy Keifez recounts her lost Orgone Accumulator. Music by Languis

We are on episode 50! Thank you all for listening along over the last couple of years. This one is special as it features a book published by Hat & Beard Press, one of Big Table's main partners in cultural pursuits.dublab: Future Roots Radio is the long-awaited book telling the story of the pioneering online radio station through interviews, photos, art, and more.The dublab universe springs to life from these pages, unveiling the ethos that has guided the storied station since 1999.We celebrated the release of the book with a live event at Neuehouse in downtown Los Angeles this past winter. The evening featured a panel moderated by DJ Mamabear with dublab DJs Rachel Day, Hoseh, Frosty, and Langosta.dublab: Future Roots Radio, out now on Hat & Beard Press, is an ode to the boundless power of creative music and community building in Los Angeles and beyond.Here's an excerpt from the conversation recorded at NeueHouse earlier this year. Music by Pharaohs

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An Essay with Digressions by Tim Carpenter is a book-length essay about photography's unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. It's also a book about photography theory, literary criticism, art history, and philosophy. Drawing on writings and poems by Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Valery, Virginia Wolff, and other artists, musicians, and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter argues passionately―in one main essay and a series of lively digressions―that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one's sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality. Printed in three colors that reflect the various “voices” of the book, the text design, provided by publisher and editor Mike Slack, follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading. To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die is a unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, and is as enthralling as other genre-melding photography books, The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer, Robert Bresson's Notes on Cinematography, and more recently, Stephen Shore's book Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, among others.Carpenter's research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.Tim and JC caught up recently to discuss this fascinating book, now in its second printing. Reading by Tim CarpenterMusic by Talk Talk

THE INTERVIEW:After 100 books on design, Steven Heller has given us a coming-of-age memoir. The award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times has included 100 color photographs in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York, a 224-page visually inspired tour of the center of New York City's 1960s and '70s youth culture.Steven Heller's memoir is not simply a chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but rather a tale of growing up, whereby with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and '70s in New York City. Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 depicts his ambitious journey from the very beginning of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his path as he moves from stints at the New York Review of Sex, to Screw, and the New York Free Press, on to the East Village Other, Grove Press, and Interview until becoming the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at the of age 23.Having followed his work for years, JC Gabel was glad to sit down and talk with him about his start.THE READING: Heller reads from his Growing Up Underground. Music by Cluster. 

It is fitting that Bruce Adams's new book, the sardonically-titled You're with Stupid: kranky, Chicago and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim's Grill off Irving Park Road in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side: It was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, The Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi's Korean-inspired restaurant, when they were first starting out.But let's back up a few years, to set the scene of what was to come. After attending college at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in the mid-1980s, Adams worked at a record shop and wrote for the fanzine Your Flesh. He caught the indie rock bug, as it were, inspired by the then burgeoning independent music industry that had grown out of labels like Dischord in Washington, DC, Sub Pop in Seattle, and Touch & Go in Chicago, who presented a more artist-friendly path for bands to make a living selling records, CDs and cassettesAdams found his way to Chicago, where, by the mid-1990s, there was a golden age of independent businesses thriving in unison: records labels (Drag City, Thrill Jockey, Atavistic, Bloodshot, Carrot Top), distributors (Ajax, Cargo, Southern), records shops (Reckless, Dusty Groove, Wax Trax, The Quaker Goes Deaf), underground press (the Chicago Reader and New City, but also Lumpen and Stop Smiling), and venues (Cabaret Metro, Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and Double Door). As Adams documents, it was a near-perfect eco-system for creativity and experimentation in a pre-digital age.You're with Stupid is both a cultural history of the Chicago music world at that time, as told through the record labels and distributors that Adams worked for but also a how-to roadmap to founding a DIY operation.  This is my conversation with Bruce Adams about his book and those times.Reading by Bruce AdamsMusic by Labradford

Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick's creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick's best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, among many others. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West 67th Street were in conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history.Pinckney's education in Hardwick's orbit took place amidst the cultural movements then sweeping New York. In addition, through his peers and former classmates—Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin—Pinckney witnessed the coming together of the New Wave scene in the East Village. He experienced the avant-garde life while discovering the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation. It was his time for hope.In Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan (FSG, 2022), Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and to the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth Hardwick was not only his link to the intellectual heart of New York but also a source of continuous support and of inspiration—in the way she worked, her artistry, and in the beauty of her voice. Through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney as a writer himself.J.C. Gabel talked with Pinckney last fall to discuss his literary beginnings and the influence of Elizabeth Hardwick and her circle on his life and work. Reading by Darryl Pinckney. Music by The Joubert Singers. Remix by Larry Levan.

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works celebrating the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. In this unconventional, illuminated biography, Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings—many previously unpublished or long unavailable–that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy.Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23. Along with her celebrated large-scale projects―including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem, and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany―Saint Phalle also produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with family, marriage to novelist Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with artist Jean Tinguely, and her productive years in Southern California.Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature, and comics has been published in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter's legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise.In the interviewer's chair this episode is writer and curator Yann Perreau, who organized some exhibitions of works by Saint Phalle. Originally from Paris, Yann now lives in Los Angeles.Here's Yann Perreau discussing the life and work of Saint Phalle with writer, critic, and biographer Nicole Rudick. Reading by Nicole RudickMusic by Grace Jones

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”, or the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As the first woman to inherit those secrets, Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful.This legacy had always felt like it belonged to them, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that resulted in amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before. Decades ago, her mother had suffered a fall that left her with amnesia too. When she recovered, she had gained access to the secrets.Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, as well as resurrected Colombian history and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the seemingly incomprehensible. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the healing power of storytelling and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.Here's my conversation with Ingrid, discussing her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds (Doubleday, 2022).Reading by Ingrid Rojas ContrerasMusic composed by Ennio Morricone

The Interview:In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream. For Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.Determined to hold on to his memories—all that was left of one of his closest friends—Hua turned to writing. Stay True (Doubleday, 2022) is the book he's been working on ever since—for over 20 years by Hua's estimation. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. It is also a book about friendship, race, grieving and recovery.I first came to know Hua's work through his music writing—first in the hip-hop column he wrote for The Wire, the British experimental music magazine, and more recently, in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Hua teaches at Bard College, and lives in Brooklyn. He grew up in the Bay Area, where most of the book takes place while he is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.Hua and I have known each other loosely for many years—we have many mutual friends and are roughly the same age. I've always admired his work, and his beautifully written second book is a highpoint, jam-packed as it is with descriptive detail, a light and easy spare prose, and a meaningful account of an unlikely friendship.Here's my conversation with Hua Hsu, discussing his new memoir, Stay True.The Reading:Hua Hsu reads from Stay True, which was part of an audio zine he made to accompany the book's release. Music by Mobb Deep 

Nick Drnaso, acclaimed author of Sabrina, is back with Acting Class, his third book on Drawn & Quarterly. A tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation, Acting Class brings together 10 strangers under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: They are all out of step with their surroundings and desperate for a change.With mounting unease, the class sinks deeper into Smith's lessons, even as he demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group's fears and desires are laid bare. Exploring the tension between who we are and how we present, Drnaso cracks open his characters' masks and takes us through an unsettling American journey.Like Sabrina—the first graphic novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize—Drnaso's latest offering is an extremely sharp study of our everyday existence and how we live. His minimalist comic-drawing style is nevertheless awash in a cinematic haze of melancholy and the color palette is hued in a realism that is uniquely his.  A friend handed me Sabrina, several years ago, knowing I was somewhat of an outsider in the realm of underground comic culture, telling me, “You will love the book in the same way you love certain novels.” And he was right.While Drnaso is revered all over the world for his bleak honestness and sly, dark humor, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Although we are of different generations, the subtlety of his style is familiar to me as a fellow Midwesterner and Chicagoan.Notably, this is Big Table's first episode centered around a graphic novel. It's certainly a change from our focus on nonfiction books, but Drnaso's storytelling pulls so effortlessly from real life that one feels his characters are meta comics versions of people encountered in our everyday lives.Here's my conversation with Nick Drnaso discussing his new book, Acting Class.Music by Japan

In her latest book, Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Atlantic, 2022), Ada Calhoun traces her fraught relationship with her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared obsession with the poet Frank O'Hara. The book features exclusive material from archival recordings of literary and art world legends, living and dead.Having stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father had conducted for his never-completed biography of O'Hara, Calhoun set out to finish the book he had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, she thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more difficult it became: Calhoun had to confront not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's and her own.The result is a kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with the moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun has offered a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind. For the Reading, Ada Calhoun reads from Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me.Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto**Other audio:Frank O'Hara reads Ode to Joy:Frank O'Hara Reads His Poems 

In The Design of Childhood, acclaimed writer, architecture critic, and historian Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. Lange now turns her sharp eye to another subject we thought we knew. Chronicling the invention of the mall by postwar architects and merchants, Lange reveals how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Bloomsbury, 2022) is Lange's perceptive account of how these shopping centers became strange and rich with contradiction. In it, Lange describes America's malls as places of freedom and exclusion—but also as places of undeniable community, and rampant consumerism.Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as shopping malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, anyway? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?Here's Episode 40: The Big Table conversation with architecture critic, writer, and historian Alexandra Lange, discussing Meet My by the Fountain.Reading by Alexandra LangeMusic by OMD

A 170-plus years ago, Henry David Thoreau began his legendary hermit walks in New England. Many of these walks were published later as some of his most cherished works as a naturalist: Walden, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod.Artist, writer and New England native Ben Shattuck does the same in Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, published by Tin House Books, which charts six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Thoreau. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau's path through the Cape's outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown's fingertip.After the Cape, Shattuck walks down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, he encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit. Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life's changing seasons.Shattuck splits his time between Los Angeles and Coastal Massachusetts, where he also runs a Davoll's General Store in Dartmouth. We caught up during the Spring to discuss his first book, Thoreau and the therapeutic nature of walking.Reading by Ben ShattuckMusic by Jürgen Müller

To write about Tony Wilson, aka Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities, a clique of unreliable narrators, constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and the Haçienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy Division and New Order into the world as he pursued myriad other creative endeavors, appointing himself a custodian of Manchester's legacy of innovation and change.To writer, broadcaster and cultural critic Paul Morley he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, shrewd mentor, insatiable publicity seeker. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book.From Manchester with Love, then, is the biography of a man who became one with his hometown of Manchester, England—the music he championed and the myths he made, of love and hate, of life and death. In the cultural theatre of Manchester, Tony Wilson broke in and took center-stage.Morley has written about music, art and entertainment since the 1970s. He wrote for the New Musical Express from 1976 to 1983. A founding member of the Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he collaborated with Grace Jones on her memoirs and is the author of a number of books about music, including The Age of Bowie, his history of classical music A Sound Mind, and a biography of Bob Dylan, You Lose Yourself, You Reappear.Our man in London, Dermot McPartland, fills in for interviewing duties and helps Morley unpack the many minds and lives of Tony Wilson. Here's Dermot's conversation with Paul Morley. Reading by Paul MorleyMusic by Joy Division

Mark Rozzo's astute and engaging new book Everyone Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Heyward, and 1906s Los Angeles, published by Ecco Press, documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward in the heyday as New Hollywood's It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of the Los Angeles scene in the Sixties.Rozzo poignantly captures the vivacity of the heady days in the early 1960s, just as the underground culture of the Beat Generation was about to explode into the mainstream counterculture of the latter part of the decade—the sex, drugs and rock ‘n' roll mantra was born in the late 1960s.Sixties Los Angeles was a new center of gravity in culture; there was a new consciousness, a West Coast symmetry between art, underground cinema, music and civil rights that had never happened before, and has never happened since. Hopper and Hayward were not only up-and-coming actors in the early 1960s, they were also cross-cultural connectors who brought together the best of underground Los Angeles art, music and politics, under one roof—literally—1712 N. Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills. This modest Spanish Colonial was the meeting ground, as Rozzo illustrates, for a who's who of that time: Jane Fonda, Andy Warhol, Joan Didion, Jasper Johns, Tina Turner, Ed Ruscha, The Byrds and the Black Panthers.Their art collection, showcased at this house on Crescent Heights, as well as the house itself, is the backdrop of Everyone Thought We Were Crazy. Rozzo tells the story in a straight-forward, dual narrative, that helps fill in large parts of Brooke's story, which compared to Hopper's, hasn't been as well documented or explored in other books. Rozzo finds the right balance.As a decade-ending benchmark, Hopper's directorial debut Easy Rider became the emblematic proto-New Hollywood independent film, alongside Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. These films help illustrate the promise and loss of that generation and that era. There isn't a happy ending in those films or in Hopper's marriage to Heyward, unfortunately—the couple divorced in 1969 just at Easy Rider was about to make cinematic history.After the divorce, Brooke eventually sold the house, broke up the art collection and moved back to New York, where she still resides. Hopper died in 2010.Rozzo's wide view of Los Angeles in the 1960s is essential reading for anyone interested in the unvarnished history of that period.Here's my conversation with Mark Rozzo discussing the life and times of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward.Reading by Mark Rozzo.Music by Love.

The EpisodeJ Dilla—aka James Dewitt Yancey or Jaydee as he was previously known—was a musical genius who was hardly known to mainstream audiences during his brief life. In Dilla Time—equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history—hip hop historian and NYU professor Dan Charnas chronicles this musical outlier who changed popular music behind the scenes, working with renowned acts like D'Angelo and Erykah Badu and influencing the music of superstars like Michael and Janet Jackson.Dilla died at the age of 32, and in his lifetime never had a pop hit. Since his death, however, he has become a demigod of sorts: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel he created on a drum machine, one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play. Charnas echoes the life of James DeWitt Yancey from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Charnas also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla's own “Motown,” to funk, techno, and disco.Dilla Time (MCD/FSG, 2022) is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to “see” and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way. It's the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla's music itself.Filling in for interviewing duties this episode is Charnas' NYU professor colleague and Hat & Beard Press editor Vivien Goldman, who is the author, most recently, of Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot.Here is Vivien's conversation with Dan Charnas, discussing the life and times of J Dilla.Reading by Dan Charnas from Dilla Time.music by J Dilla

The InterviewIt's not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years.Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when I was working for the indie record label Drag City. Keene had done the cover art for the Silver Jews' Arizona Record as well as Pavement's Wowee Zowee on Matador. He had gone to college with David Berman (Silver Jews) and Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) in the 1980s, and they remained friends and collaborators afterward.Although he is known to many for his indie rock album covers, he has a much bigger audience today outside of the music scene of downtown NY from another era. Not only is he now collected in museums but he is still lovingly known for making affordable art: most of Keene's work retails for under $70; in the 1990s heyday, it was only $5 or $10 a piece. Steve continues to crank out 50 paintings at a time, day-in and day-out, from his converted auto body shop home/studio in Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked with his architect wife and family for decades.The Steve Keene Art Book—originally conceived during his sold out show at Shepard Fairey's LA Gallery Subliminal Projects in 2016—is the first art book dedicated exclusively to his work as a fine artist. For this episode, I spoke with the book's editor Daniel Efram, a photographer, producer, and long-time manager of the Apples in Stereo—for whom Keene also created the cover art on Fun Trick Noise Maker 25 years ago—about Steve Keene and his lifelong artistic journey.I've been a long-time fan and collector of Keene's work. Twenty years ago, I spent a day with him, profiling him in the pages of Stop Smiling, “The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes,” which I published from 1995 to 2009 from Chicago and New York. Hence, this was a nice circle of life moment. The Steve Keene Art Book is published through Hat & Beard Press and Tractor Beam, Efram's New York City-based press. The ReadingEditor Daniel Efram reads from his essay in The Steve Keene Art Book.Music by The Apples in Stereo

Adam Clair was barely out of undergrad when he began the manuscript for Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery (Hachette Books, 2022).The book is a definitive history of the 1990s underground musical movement known as the Elephant 6 Collective. Founded by Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, and Jeff Mangum, who grew up as friends in the small town of Ruston, Louisiana, the Elephant 6 was initially centered around three bands—the Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Olivia Tremor Control—whose records were expertly produced in home studios in Denver and Athens, Georgia, by Robert Schneider, who wouldn't mind being referred to as the Brian Wilson-like engineer extraordinaire of the collective. (Schneider is currently a professor of math in Georgia, having earned a PhD in his post-rocker years.)By the late-1990s, the Elephant 6 had exploded onto the musical scene in a way that hasn't really been felt since—their '60s psychedelia-inspired, almost utopian mindset of a better world with their music as the soundtrack was as intoxicating then as it is now.Rock ‘n' Roll stardom was something that seemed to frighten and elude the collective's founders, however, who were more focused on the art of the music than on the business side.By the turn of the century, relentless touring and recording schedules led Neutral Milk Hotel's front man Jeff Mangum to retreat from performing—and even from doing interviews. The Olivia's disbanded for a time, the Apples changed line ups, and the second-generation bands, like Of Montreal and Beulah, began to build their own audiences. In 2013, the original members of Neutral Milk Hotel reunited for a year or two of touring. Then Bill Doss from Olivia Tremor Control passed away suddenly, thwarting their comeback.All the while, Adam Clair was gathering reportage. He conducted over 100 interviews over 13 years to complete Endless Endless. Although the reclusive Jeff Mangum did not speak to him for the book, Clair was able to carve in Mangum's voice from past interviews (more than I remember taking place, having been around to see it unfold in real time the first time around). Clair and I spoke recently about Endless Endless and how it came to be. Tune in for all the details.For the Reading this episode, Adam Clair reads from his introduction to Endless Endless.Music by The Olivia Tremor Control

José Vadi grew up in California's Inland Empire, but his roots go back to Puerto Rico and Mexico. His abuelo, or grandfather, was an Okie who hopped freight trains west to Nebraska and then on to California, the promised land. Like many immigrants, he worked for a time as a migrant worker in the salad bowl of California's agriculturally rich central valley, before settling down in the San Bernardino Valley to raise a family. Vadi's second book, Inter State: Essays from California (Soft Skull Press), is an innovative collection of interconnected essays. Each piece appeared elsewhere previously, in slightly different form, but together, they create a prismatic picture of California's sprawling nooks and crannies—from the agricultural lands to the gentrifying urban culture of the bay area. Vadi's routines, including commuting to his old job in San Francisco, are a common thread that weave these essays together. Although they were all written between 2015 and early 2020, as Vadi notes in the afterword, “connecting California, then the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, and 2020's record-breaking fire season grabbed and pulled at the seams as hard, quickly and destructively as possible.” Inter State is a valuable book in understanding the California of today, a state rife with stubborn issues: neo-liberal fantasy-land economics, a housing crisis, an ill-prepared bureaucracy for managing climate change and natural disasters, and largely tone-deaf leaders who may say the right things but who are just as compromised as some of the swamp creatures in Washington, DC. And yet… Vadi's book is hopeful. He left the Bay Area for Sacramento and now has more time to write poems, essays, plays, take photos, and skateboard (another undercurrent in the book). He seems to have successfully removed late capitalism as a hinderance to his life, at least for now. His new surroundings in Sacramento have renewed his creativity and purpose. We caught up recently to discuss Inter State and what he's up to next.The Reading: Jose Vadi reads from his title essay, "Inter State."Music by Pharaohs

The Interview:Although he did experience some fanfare in his lifetime, German writer, academic, and novelist W.G. Sebald—Max to his friends and colleagues—died 20 years ago in a car crash near his adoptive home in Norwich, England. He was only 58.His postmodern novels—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—were written in quick succession in a period of less than 10 years, and they were all published in English translations in less than five years, making him one of Germany's biggest authors, almost overnight. Before his death, Sebald had taught in the British university system for decades, mainly at the University of East Anglia, where he helped found the literary translation department. He really did not begin writing in his signature style—a mix of travelogue, memoir, historical fiction with embedded pictures and ephemera—until middle age, however. Walter Benjamin famously opined that any great writer creates their own genre; Sebald accomplished this with just a brief collection of books. Through his unique, poetic prose style of writing, his books grab hold and immerse readers in a world of memory and loss like no other novelist. Trauma runs through his work and his characters seem so real because, like most fictional creations—at least in part—they are based on real people. Sebald's distinctive style got him into trouble, both when he was alive and certainly posthumously. Some readers have taken issue with his re-purposing of Jewish folks' true-life stories. He has been accused, in some cases, of exploiting these stories for personal gain through novelization. When I first began to read his work, shortly after his death in 2001, I interpreted his work to be an homage to the Jewish lives he chronicled, written by a German who grew up in the shadow, silence, and shame of the horrors of WWII. Sebald's father was a military man—a Nazi officer during the war and a member of the re-constituted German army in the post-war years. Sebald grew up in the beatific surroundings of Bavaria in Germany and had a deep hatred for the Nazi regime and his own family's complicity. The fate of the Jews—and other minorities targeted by the Nazi war machine—is a mournful thread that Sebald tears at throughout all of his novels. He also wrote a nonfiction study of the bombings of German cities, entitled On the Natural History of Destruction.Enter biographer Carole Angier, whose previous books include studies of novelist Jean Rhys and Italian physicist and writer Primo Levi. Angier, who grew up in Canada before returning to the UK, is of Viennese descent. She is also Jewish and roughly the same age Sebald would have been had he lived. It took her seven years to finish Speak, Silence (Bloomsbury, 2021). The title, of course, a nod to Nabokov's famous memoir, Speak, Memory, one of Sebald's favorite books. Angier and I caught up recently to discuss her 600-plus-page doorstopper of a book. One of the reasons I wanted to talk with her about it—apart from my longtime love of Sebald—was to ask for her thoughts on the controversy his work still seems to generate, even 20 years after his death. A great deal of the reviews of Speak, Silence, in the States at least, were hyper-critical of Sebald playing fast and loose with some facts in his fiction. But all great fiction writers pluck characteristics and facts to shape their fictional worlds and, so, while Sebald's use of real photographs and ephemera in his work for visual effect made his narrative style offensive to some, it also made it more potent for others. In this interview, Angier speaks to this subject, and many more.The Reading:For the reading, we pulled audio from an event at the 92nd Street Y from 2001, where Sebald read from his then newest novel Austerlitz. He was tragically killed in a car crash later that year. Music by Tangerine Dream92Y Reading link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccMCGjWLlhY&t=1620s 

Interview: As one of the most influential book editors of his generation—first at Simon & Shuster and then, for many years, at Knopf and Random House, Robert Gottlieb has lived a charmed life.He was also one of the few storied editors of The New Yorker  in the 1990s.Gottlieb's other two passions are modern dance and cinema: He helped program the George Balanchine Theatre for decades from his editor's desk, all while acquiring and editing myriad film books during those years.And now, at 90, he's written a film biography himself: A definitive portrait of Swedish actress Greta Garbo, whose elusiveness, he illustrates, was something she carried with her throughout her life: from her peasant-girl days in Stockholm in the early 20th century to her Hollywood years to her reclusive life in New York for five decades after retreating from Hollywood and acting in the early 1940s, just as the US entered WWII.Garbo, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a gorgeously illustrated hybrid book, with dozens of images helping to illustrate the enigma that Garbo created onscreen. After Gottlieb's main narrative, the book also includes a Garbo Reader of sorts, with other published work and images about her life and times, illuminating the whole picture of this mysterious yet trailblazing woman, whose own privacy was essential to her happiness and very existence.As a child of the depression years, Garbo was omnipresent in Gottlieb's mind as a young kid going to see films in New York. Here, his wonderful prose  captures this complicated woman who became one of the most famous faces in the world, almost overnight. And yet, she retired at age 35, after acting in only 28 films.Garbo is an invaluable book for anyone interested in her work and film history; from the silent era to the Golden Age of cinema.The Reading:For the Reading this episode, we have an excerpt of the audiobook version of Garbo, read by the actress Maria Tucci, Gottlieb's wife.Music composed by William Grant Still and performed by Mark Boozer

After seeing Frida Kahlo's painting “The Two Fridas,” writer and professor Emily Rapp Black felt an intense connection with the famous Mexican artist—maybe one of the most recognized faces in the world. Rapp Black has been an amputee since childhood. She grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned to hide her disability from the world. Kahlo, too, was an amputee, having sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash during her teenage years, eventually leading to her right leg being amputated. In Kahlo's life and art, Rapp Black saw her own life, from numerous operations to the compulsion to create pain silences. Rapp Black—an award-winning memoirist—tells the story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs disease, giving birth to her healthy daughter, and learning to accept her body—and how along her path in life, Frida inspired her to find a way forward when all else seemed lost.  Frida is the subject of Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Notting Hill Editions, 2021), Rapp Black's fourth and most recent book. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the School of Medicine.Music by Stereolab

Jason Jules is a writer, blogger, stylist, brand consultant, and devotee of the Ivy look, albeit in a quite subverted form. The face of Drakes of London and writer of the John Simons documentary film A Modernist, Jules is widely recognized as the most stylish man in London media and culture.Described by Complex magazine as having a style akin to a “living, breathing jazz song,” he is also the creator of the online and real-world style brand Garmsville.His latest book, Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style, published by Reel Art Press, charts a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted a clothing style seen largely as the preserve of a privileged elite, and remade it for themselves. The Oxford button-down shirt, the hand-stitched loafer, the repp ties—these otherwise conventional clothes are donned with an approach so revolutionary, you won't be able to see them the same way again.Black Ivy is an art book about clothes, but it's also about freedom—both individual and collective. From the most avant-garde jazz musicians, visual artists, and poets to the more influential architects, philosophers, political leaders, and writers, Black Ivy explores, for the first time, the major role this period of aspiration—and upheaval—played, and what these clothes said about the people who wore them.Dermot McPartland, our Man in London, handled interviewing duties for this episode.The ReadingJason Jules reads from the introduction to Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style.Music by Pharoah Sanders

The Interview: Los Angeles is a hundred suburbs in search of a city, or so it's been said.In his new book about Los Angeles, novelist and nonfiction writer Rosecrans Baldwin—a somewhat recent transplant to Los Angeles from the East Coast—tackles the famous quip and expands on it. His premise in Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (MCD/FSG, 2021) is spot-on: “Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, it is an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles,” as a concept. Baldwin spent years reporting on this book before finally finishing it during the pandemic last year. He looks at the city through so many prisms and angles, it's impossible to finish reading Everything Now without acquiring a deep (or deeper) fondness for L.A. The book is an exploration of the city, its people, and its culture. And as stated on the sell copy of the book, in Los Angeles, “you have no better plan that exists to watch the United States' past, and its possible futures play themselves out.” Like Thom Andersen's magnum opus, the documentary film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Everything Now is a deeply researched, and well-argued street-level view of the city—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Baldwin and I caught up this past fall to discuss how his latest book came to be. The Reading:Rosecrans Baldwin reads from his latest book, Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles.Music by Flying Lotus

The Interview:Dave Hickey was an inspirational character—a writer of essays and songs, an astute art and literary critic, a one-time gallerist and, certainly, an art-world provocateur.Hickey published his two most famous books in the 1990s, The Invisible Dragon—a call to reconsider beauty in art—and Air Guitar, a cult classic essay collection that exposed the more personal and venerable style of cultural criticism.Dave passed away at the age of 82, a few weeks after we recorded this interview with his biographer, Daniel Oppenheimer. Hickey's pariah status had by then waned, but he was the last of a certain school of rebel writers of the 1960s and 1970s who could still churn out consistently good work.Based in Austin, Texas, where Dave got his start as a gallerist—having opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in 1967—writer and now biographer Daniel Oppenheimer charts Hickey's life and times in Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, a smart, compact biography published by the University of Texas Press.Drawing from first-person interviews with Hickey, his wife and friends, comrades and critics, Oppenheimer helps explain Why Dave Hickey Matters and why we should read him, particularly his essay collections Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers.With Hickey's passing, this episode has become a tribute to the great Dave Hickey, as much as it was a good conversation with his biographer. He will be missed. But his writing will live on. The Reading: Artist and professor Joel Ross reads a part of “Dealing” from Dave Hickey's essay collection Air Guitar.Music by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno

The Interview:  Like many readers in the States, I first became aware of Norman Ohler's work after reading Blitzed (2015), his epic history of drug use in the Third Reich. The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Ohler's follow up—which came out in paperback in the States last year—was born from some of the research he was doing for Blitzed. The book is a page-turning historical thriller I couldn't put down. It's essential reading for anyone interested in WWII history and specifically subterfuge.Ohler, who lives in Berlin, and I spoke last year while he was vacationing with his family on the island of Jersey.We started in on how he discovered the untold story of Harro and Libertas, two free-love provocateurs who ran an underground circuit of anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns, as well as formal espionage activities, from the heart of Berlin during the height of the Third Reich's power, and how their love story and largely unknown work to fight against fascism in their home country need to be better-known to the world.The Reading: Scholar and author Jeffrey H. Jackson reads from his kindred spirit WWII resistance book, Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books), which follows the lives of two French women artists and lovers on the island of Jersey who defied the Nazis much the way Harro and Libertas did in Berlin. Music composed by Kurt WeillPerformed by Westchester Symphony Orchestra & conducted by Siegfried Landau

The Interview:Musician Warren Ellis' first book, Nina Simone's Gum (Faber & Faber, 2021), is a magical journal mixing memoir, cultural history, reportage, and travelogue. The memorable title comes from the Meltdown Festival, a concert series his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, curated in London in 1999 that featured a rare live performance by Nina Simone herself.After her set, Ellis rushed the stage—not for a coveted set list, but for a piece of chewing gum Simone had discarded atop her piano, which he then preserved in a rolled-up hand towel. Ellis' memento lived in a crumpled Tower Records bag for the next 20 years.Two decades later, when Cave curated “Stranger than Kindness,” an exhibition at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, he included Simone's gum as a piece of sculpture cast in silver. Cave called it a “religious artifact.”In Nina Simone's Gum, Ellis brings you along as he tracks the artifact for posterity. The book is a meditation on life, musicianship, and the importance of bestowing meaning to objects and experiences; it is also a tome about friendship, the artistic process, and human connection. To mix things up—and because Ellis was on tour—Dermot McPartland, our man in London, took over interviewing duties. The Reading:For the reading this episode, Warren Ellis reads from Nina Simone's Gum, his latest book.Music by Dirty Three

The Interview:For over 50 years, Joan Didion, a daughter of California, has been in a league all her own, as a writer and novelist. Unlike many critics, she is capable of writing memorable fiction that, although not as widely read as her reportage and singular essays, stands the test of time. The Library of America Series recently published their second Joan Didion volume featuring the novels Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, as well as nonfiction works like Salvador, Miami and After Henry, her third major essay collection. Edited by former LA Times book editor, author, and critic David Ulin, the collection is brimming with her enduring legacy and highlights her works from the 1980s and 1990s, which are not as well known. In this episode, Ulin helps us unpack why Didion's later work and overall influence cannot be underestimated among several younger generations of novelists and essayists. The Reading:For the reading this episode, journalist and author Steffie Nelson reads the piece “A Trip to Xanadu” from the recently published collection of odds and ends by Didion, entitled Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Knopf). Nelson is the author of Slouching Toward Los Angeles (Rare Bird Books), a collection of essays about Didion and the City of Angels.Music by Yusef Lateef

The Interview:Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a talent agent and screenwriter. One of his childhood heroes was the doomed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930s to eke out a living as a screenwriter while he labored on what ended up being his fourth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. A few months shy of his 40th birthday, Specktor moved back to L.A. and into a crumbling building across the street from where Fitzgerald lived out his last years. Flailing professionally and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, he became "unmoored." Instead of cracking up, as Fitz had after the Roaring Twenties ended and he struggled to complete his post-Gatsby masterpiece Tender is the Night, Specktor embarked on a journey of self-discovery, re-evaluating ideas of success and failure in general but especially in Los Angeles, his home town. What followed is part cultural memoir, part cultural history, and part portrait of a place, as the dust jacket declares in Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California (Tin House Books, 2021). Specktor tells his own narrative alongside some known and lesser-known players of the New Hollywood era of his youth: you meet Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, and Michael Cimino. The result is a masterwork of genre-bending nonfiction, an unvarnished view of Tinseltown and its demons, but also its undeniable magic and charm. In the end, after much loss, optimism wins. And that is when you know you have a good book on your hands: When it helps us navigate through the "beautiful ruins that await us all." J.C. Gabel spoke with Skecktor, earlier this fall, about his latest book and the creative process. The Reading: Matthew Specktor reads from his latest book, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California.Music by David Bowie.

The Interview: Kyle Beachy has been skateboarding for as long as he's been creating stories. For him, the two have always been intertwined. After releasing the coming-of-age novel The Slide in 2009, he began to write more seriously about skateboarding, as aficionado, critic, and essayist. A decade's worth of this material is now included in The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central Publishing), his second, book-length collection. The Most Fun Thing delves deep into skateboarding's origins and ethos. What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of 40, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion hatched in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths.Beachy is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he has taught for more than a decade. He sat down with J.C. Gabel earlier this fall to discuss the new book, nonfiction vs. fiction writing, and how exactly skateboarding has shaped his life. The Reading: Kyle Beachy reads from his latest collection, The Most Fun Thing. Music by Hieroglyphics

The Interview:With the world leaders of the G20 having met about climate change last week and the upcoming United Nations climate summit happening in Scotland this week, we're airing our conversation from a few months back with journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, who began to more steadily research and write about the environment after moving with his wife to New Orleans a few years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His sprawling cover story for The New York Times Magazine, “Losing Earth,” told about how American scientists had figured out the solutions to what is now the climate crisis in the late 1970s. The Reagan Revolution in 1980, however, and America's swing to the right, led to a suppression of sober conversations aimed at reducing fossil fuel use or human-driven environmental harm. Deregulation and rampant lobbying and corruption by the energy companies have plagued us for four decades since. Nothing was done then, and nothing has really been done since, as Greta Thunberg noted the other day in her blah-blah-blah, all-talk-and-no-action commentary after the G20 summit, highlighting the inability of our world leaders to act in meaningful ways—or act at all!Rich's most recent book, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade (MCD/FSG), recollects and reworks for book publication, a large part of his journalism from the past decade. Rich has also published three novels (including one about climate change, Odds Against Tomorrow), and has a natural ear for dialogue. His research and writing chops are put to good use in this first nonfiction collection, covering everything from DuPont poisoning waterways (one of the stories in the book became the Todd Haynes film Dark Water) to kamikaze starfish to late-20th Century glow-in-the-dark rabbit experiments. Second Nature is essential reading for anyone who cares about the ecology (and the future) of the earth. The Reading:Nathaniel Rich reads from his latest collection, Second Nature (MCD/FSG) Music by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental

The Interview: Peter Mendelsund began his career as a concert pianist, and reinvented himself as a graphic designer, now creative director, almost by accident. He came to book design—first as a reader, then as an independent bookstore employee, and ultimately, as a book cover designer, which he practiced full time at PenguinRandom House. He is presently the Creative Director of The Atlantic, and in his spare time, he writes novels, the second of which, The Delivery, is currently out on hardcover from FSG. For The Interview in this episode, J.C. Gabel talks with Mendelsund about his last nonfiction book, The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers & Art at the Edges of Literature, published by Ten Speed Press, which he co-authored with literary scholar David Alworth. What began as a Harvard lecture has become a gorgeous coffee table book examining the artwork of book cover design through the modern age; it is an overview of trends, insights, and back stories, many told through other voices from the literary and design worlds. It is also an invaluable tool for anyone interested in book jacket design and its rich and colorful history. The Reading: Peter Mendelsund reads from his latest novel, The Delivery (FSG) Music by Laurie Spiegel

The Interview:On this episode of Big Table, artist and photographer Jona Frank talks with J.C. Gabel about her visual memoir, Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (Monacelli Press), which documents, in elaborately staged sets, her troubled childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey. Frank's mother suffered from mental illness, as did her brother, who was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the photographs, three different actors portray Frank at various stages of her adolescence, with actress Laura Dern cast as her mother. Frank's writing, produced in vignettes, augments the original photography in Cherry Hill, a beautifully packaged book designed by Alex Kalman. As Arthur Lebow pointed out earlier this year in a New York Times feature about Frank's latest book, Jona Frank has “recreated non-Kodak moments, the kind that were hidden rather than commemorated.”The Reading:Jona Frank reads from her new visual memoir, Cherry Hill.  Music by Raymond Guiot

The Interview:On this episode of Big Table, J.C. Gabel talks with We Transfer co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Damian Bradfield about his first book The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet (Penguin Press), which imagines and outlines a path toward a better internet experience than exists today. Bradfield knows that most of the big data being compiled online is misused and deceptively collected using legalese, “accept terms,” and disclaimers that no one reads. The Trust Manifesto unpacks what many of us users assume is going on behind the scenes of surveillance capitalism. Bradfield is right: To regain some credibility in an age of tech monopoly normalcy, the industry needs to build a bridge of trust with its users again. Not a month goes by without another revelation by a former employee of one of these tech behemoths, exposing profit-over-safety, profit-over-common-sense, and (of late) profit-over-democracy itself. The Trust Manifesto is a wake-up call, and a road map to a better internet, and, one hopes, a better post-digital-age future.The Reading: Technology writer and critic, Joanne McNeil reads from her debut Lurking: How a Person Became a User (MCD/FSG Books), a concise but wide-ranging history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of view of the user.Music by Vangelis

The Interview: In Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (The University of Chicago Press), William Sites brings the cosmic musician back to earth—specifically to the city's South Side, where from 1946 to 1961, he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. On this episode, William Sites, the Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, talks with J.C. Gabel about the mid-century history of Chicago's South Side via the visionary Sun Ra. The Reading:Musician, artist and poet Damon Locks reads from Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City.Music by Sun Ra and His Arkestra

Episode 16: Luc SanteTHE INTERVIEWSince his debut book, Lowlife: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Luc Sante has charted his own path, not only as a writer of distinction, but as a writer who has created a genre all his own in the process. His books include The Other Paris, a sequel of sorts to Lowlife; a memoir, A Factory of Facts; a book on Folk Photography and Evidence, about crime scene photography. His first essay collection, Kill All Your Darlings, was released 14 years ago by Verse Chorus Press in Portland. His second essay collection, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, also published by Verse Chorus Press, was released last year in the midst of the pandemic and was like a comfort food for me while we were on lockdown. Maybe the People is an autobiographical deep dive into Sante's youth in New York City's Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s and how it shaped his writing over the last three decades.  THE READING: Luc Sante reads from his latest collection, Maybe the People Would Be the Times.MUSIC CREDITMusic by the Velvet Underground

The Interview:California poet laureate and former Director of the NEA Dana Gioia discusses the lasting legacy of Ray Bradbury on contemporary culture and fantastical fiction with New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean (The Library Book and The Orchid Thief) and Bradbury biographer, professor, and Hat & Beard author Sam Weller.The Reading:Sam Weller reads from Bradbury's lesser-known trove of 1950s early short stories. Music by Nino Rota.

The Interview: Brigitte Benkemoun, an investigative reporter in France, buys a vintage address book online for her partner, and soon discovers that it belonged to artist/photographer Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress, infamous “weeping woman,” and unsung hero of the surrealist movement. Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, An Address Book, A Life (Getty Publications) is Benkemoun's study of Maar's legacy and later years. The Reading: Hat & Beard editor Sybil Perez reads from Reading Dora Maar (Getty Publications).  Music by Yellow Magic Orchestra

The Interview: Yuval Taylor's dual biography Zora & Langston (Norton), documents the lives, times, and work of novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and poet and writer Langston Hughes, two towering pillars of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. Taylor documents their intimate (and productive) friendship, their falling out with one another (and their patron), and the regret they both lived with until their deaths for not reconciling with one another. The Reading: Artist and musician Senon Williams reads selections from Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues, Hughes' first poetry collection published by Knopf in 1927.Music credits:Music composed by Florence PricePerformed by Fort Smith Symphony and John Jeter**Other audio:Zora clips: From a session with Alan Lomax / Library of Congress (YouTube)Langston clips:Langston Hughes Reads Langston Hughes (YouTube)The Weary Blues with Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, and Leonard Feather (YouTube)

THE INTERVIEWPhotographer Janette Beckman and artist/art director Cey Adams (who helmed the art department at the legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Records in its 1980s and '90s heyday) discuss their graffiti art and photography collaboration The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists, which was staged as an exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles a few years ago and collected in the book companion, co-published by Hat & Beard Press and Fahey/Klein Gallery, seen here. Musicby Arthur Russell*Interview Clips from Style Wars (sourced from Youtube)

The Interview:In Vincent's Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him (University of Chicago Press), Italian curator Mariella Guzzoni unpacks her year's long research into the books that Vincent Van Gogh read throughout his life and how they influenced and inspired his painting and drawing, letters, and purpose in life.  The Reading:Guzonni reads from The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Penguin) Music: Composed by Igor StravinskyPerformed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

The InterviewWilliam Deresiewicz documents “how creators are struggling to survive in the age of billionaires and big tech,” which is the subtitle of his masterful new book, The Death of the Artist (Henry Holt). This book is a well-written examination of the creative economy, and how it has been hollowed out and de-monetized by tech spin and greed; the toxic nonsense otherwise known as “the gig economy,” Unlike most takedowns of these 21st Century post-digital-age doldrums, The Death of the Artist has some prescriptive advice and is rooted in reality-bites pragmatism.  The Reading Deresiewicz reads from The Death of the Artist. Music by Languis

The Interview:Geoff Dyer discusses “Broadsword Calling Danny Boy”: Watching ‘Where Eagles Dare', published by Pantheon, his study of the 1969 action film featuring  a young Clint Eastwood in one of his first starring roles, alongside Richard Burton. The Reading:Dyer reads from his latest book See/Saw: Looking at Photographs, his collection  of writings over the last two decades on and about photography, published by Graywolf Press. Music:by Jonathan Knight"Where Eagles Dare" Soundtrack Suite (Ron Goodwin)Clips sourced from Youtube"Where Eagles Dare- Making of On Location: The Cast and Crew talk about 'Where Eagles Dare' (1968)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slGNnC8NOyo&t=165s"Where Eagles Dare" official trailerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khIZwbXDF0o&t=74s"Where Eagles Dare" clip- Broadsword calling Danny Boyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdaeBiF__u4&t=41s 

The Interview:Two distinguished Orwell scholars, John Rodden and D.J. Taylor, unpack the Orwell enigma: fact, fiction, myth and the most enduring legacy of any writer in the English language since Shakespeare.  Rodden's most recent Orwell book is Become George Orwell (Princeton University Press) and Mr. Taylor's is a study of Orwell's most famous book, On Nineteen Eighty-Four (Abrams Press)The Reading:D.J. Taylor reads the first chapter of On Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Story of George Orwell's Masterpiece.Credit: music by Terry Riley

THE INTERVIEWJournalist, author and biographer and Mary Gabriel discusses Ninth Street Women, published by Little, Brown, a five part biography of painters from the Abstract Expressionist era: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. This door-stopper is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand American art. THE READINGFor the reading this episode, painter Celia Paul reads from her memoir Self-Portrait, published by NYRB Classics, which recounts the period after WWII to today, including her relationship with fellow painter Lucian Freud. Music by Dorothy Ashby

The Interview: Biographer Colin Asher, discusses the legacy of one of the greatest unknown American writers, Nelson Algren, a pre-Beat Generation realist who also took the Underground Man to new heights in the 1930s thru the 1970s, writing from the working man and woman’s perspective in Chicago and elsewhere. Here, he discusses his definitive biography, Never A Lovely So Real (Norton).The Reading: Original compositions by Ken Vandermark with Nelson Algren reading The Man with the Golden Arm in the 1970s, unearthed by Mr. Asher.