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Mohsin Hamid | False Starts | Granta Magazine

Mohsin Hamid on the benefits of a starting a novel for the fourth time, why writing is like digging a well, and the Douglas Adams school of authorship.

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PEN Out Loud: Lest We Forget
PEN America and the Strand present a retrospective of 2018 through the eyes of some of our most talented authors. Panelists, from left to right: moderator Rakesh Satyal, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Wayétu Moore, and Amitava Kumar.

Amitava Kumar’s “Immigrant, Montana” blends the traditional coming of age novel with the story of an Indian immigrant coming to America, in a book that was referred to as “bio-fiction.” Wayetú Moore’s “She Would Be King” weaves together the historical facts of the founding of Liberia with magical realism, bringing together characters from all corners of the African diaspora. Together, these authors will speak about their work, this year’s news cycles, and what it means to work as a writer in an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts.”
Tim Wu: The Curse of Bigness
We live in an "oligopoly age" in which many industries are controlled by just a few firms—big banks, big pharma, big tech. Bigness has concentrated not just economic but also political power in too few hands. So says Columbia law professor Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality" and comes to CHF to discuss his most recent book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. Calling for tighter antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate bigness, Wu explains not only what went wrong, but what its broader implications are for our economy, our society, and capitalism at large.
Kevin Young on "Brown" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair
Kevin Young on Brown: Poems at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Ashley Ford.

James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection.

Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From "History"—a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"—to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power. These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi "barkeep, activist, waiter" Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle "De La Soul Is Dead," about the days when hip-hop was growing up ("we were black then, not yet / African American"), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story. A testament to Young's own—and our collective—experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time.
Joy Lisi Rankin: "A People's History of Computing in the United States"
By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility, and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.
Evan Narcisse Talks About Writing Rise of the Black Panther
Evan Narcisse is the coauthor with TaNehisi Coates of Rise of the Black Panther, a bestselling series that presents the backstory of the most popular black character in comic book history. The six-issue series is now available as a bound graphic novel.

Rise of the Black Panther provides a mythic foundation for the Marvel comic book franchise that has become a transformative cultural phenomenon, enlisting the talents of some of America’s leading African American public intellectuals and writers, including Coates and Roxane Gay.

Narcisse is a long-time comic book critic for io9, the sci-fi blog. His reviews and articles have also appeared in Essence, the Washington Post, and Atlantic Monthly.
Eric Klinenberg: Palaces for the People
Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance and the author of the acclaimed books Going Solo and Heat Wave. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and This American Life. @EricKlinenberg.

Dorian T. Warren is President of the Center for Community Change Action and Vice-President of the Center for Community Change. He is also a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Co-Chair of the Economic Security Project. He previously taught for over a decade at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Warren also worked at MSNBC where he was a Contributor, fill-in host for Melissa Harris Perry and Now with Alex Wagner, and Host and Executive Producer of Nerding Out on MSNBC’s digital platform. He has also written for The Nation, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Salon, Washington Post, New York Times, Medium, Ebony, and Boston Review. Warren is co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy and co-editor of Race and American Political Development. In 2013, he was included on the list of NBC’s theGrio’s 100 people making history today.

In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. These are places where people gather and linger, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. Klinenberg calls this the “social infrastructure”: When it is strong, neighborhoods flourish; when it is neglected, as it has been in recent years, families and individuals must fend for themselves.

Klinenberg takes us around the globe—from a floating school in Bangladesh to an arts incubator in Chicago, from a soccer pitch in Queens to an evangelical church in Houston—to show how social infrastructure is helping to solve some of our most pressing challenges: isolation, crime, education, addiction, political polarization, and even climate change.

Richly reported, elegantly written, and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People urges us to acknowledge the crucial role these spaces play in civic life. Our social infrastructure could be the key to bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides—and safeguarding democracy.
Literary Lives: 2018 National Book Festival
Mark Eisner presents "Neruda: The Poet's Calling," Kay Redfield Jamison presents "Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania and Character" and Fiona Sampson presents "In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Mark Eisner has spent most of the past two decades on projects related the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1971. Eisner's recent work is "Neruda: The Poet's Calling" (Ecco). Library Journal called the book "a definitive biography." In addition to writing about Neruda, Eisner has translated many of his poems, including ones for "The Essential Neruda." In association with Latino Public Broadcasting, Eisner is working on a documentary of the poet's life.

Speaker Biography: Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best-sellers "An Unquiet Mind," "Night Falls Fast" and "Touched with Fire," and is the co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder, "Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression." Her new book is "Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character" (Vintage). Dr. Jamison is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the National Academy of Medicine, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.
Patrick deWitt | eh List
The eh List Presents Patrick deWitt for his novel French Exit

In conversation with journalist Nathalie Atkinson
"Click Here to Kill Everybody": A Book Talk with Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier, the author of Click Here to Kill Everybody in conversation with Abby Everett Jaques, MIT.

From the description of "Click Here to Kill Everybody":

Computer security is no longer about data; it's about life and property. This change makes an enormous difference, and will shake up our industry in many ways. First, data authentication and integrity will become more important than confidentiality. And second, our largely regulation-free Internet will become a thing of the past. Soon we will no longer have a choice between government regulation and no government regulation. Our choice is between smart government regulation and stupid government regulation. Given this future, it's vital that we look back at what we've learned from past attempts to secure these systems, and forward at what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we need to secure them in the future.
Heather Havrilesky on "What if this Were Enough?" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair
Heather Havrilesky on "What if this Were Enough?: Essays" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Ashley Ford for PBS Books.

From the publisher: By the acclaimed critic, memoirist, and advice columnist behind the popular "Ask Polly," an impassioned collection tackling our obsession with self-improvement and urging readers to embrace the imperfections of the everyday.

Heather Havrilesky's writing has been called "whip-smart and profanely funny" (Entertainment Weekly) and "required reading for all humans" (Celeste Ng). In her work for New York, The Baffler, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, as well as in "Ask Polly," her advice column for The Cut, she dispenses a singular, cutting wisdom—an ability to inspire, provoke, and put a name to our most insidious cultural delusions.

What If This Were Enough? is a mantra and a clarion call. In its chapters—many of them original to the book, others expanded from their initial publication—Havrilesky takes on those cultural forces that shape us. We've convinced ourselves, she says, that salvation can be delivered only in the form of new products, new technologies, new lifestyles. From the allure of materialism to our misunderstandings of romance and success, Havrilesky deconstructs some of the most poisonous and misleading messages we ingest today, all the while suggesting new ways to navigate our increasingly bewildering world.

Through her incisive and witty inquiries, Havrilesky urges us to reject the pursuit of a shiny, shallow future that will never come. These timely, provocative, and often hilarious essays suggest an embrace of the flawed, a connection with what already is, who we already are, what we already have. She asks us to consider: What if this were enough? Our salvation, Havrilesky says, can be found right here, right now, in this imperfect moment.
Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon with Hans Ulrich Obrist
A series of interviews with artists, authors, architects, and others representing Chicago’s diverse creative community, presented by the Chicago Humanities Festival, in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO, Navy Pier, and Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with presenting partner, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

What do artist Theaster Gates, architect Jeanne Gang, and photographer Dawoud Bey have in common?

They’re all contributing to Chicago’s ever-evolving creative culture—and will be sitting down with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and one of the world's leading art curators and critics, known for his long-form, dynamic interview marathons. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon is Obrist’s first U.S. marathon, and takes a multi-dimensional, multidisciplinary look at creativity in the city, past, present and future.

Through a wide-ranging dialogue with over 20 Chicago-based creatives, Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon examined the forces that have made and continue to make Chicago a creative powerhouse.

Funding for Creative Chicago was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation with additional support from Elizabeth A. Liebman, Herman Miller, and the WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

The event, featuring 20 artists, architects, authors, and representatives from the city, took place on Sept. 29, 2018 at Navy Pier.
Meet the Author: Ariel Levy (THE RULES DO NOT APPLY)
Ariel Levy (author of THE RULES DO NOT APPLY) discusses her favorite part of being a writer, why reading is important, and offers advice to aspiring writers.
N. K. Jemisin | How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

N.K. Jemisin is joined in conversation by Makeba Lavan. Makeba is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she focuses on (African) American Studies, Afrofuturism and Popular Culture. She has taught writing and literature courses at Lehman College since 2014.
Sujatha Gidla: 2018 National Book Festival
Sujatha Gidla discusses "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Sujatha Gidla was born an "untouchable" in Andhra Pradesh, India. (Untouchables are from the lowest caste or born without a caste.) She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. Her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. Her new book, "Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a memoir of her uncle, who was a Maoist leader and founder of a left-wing guerrilla group. Gidla lives in New York and works as a conductor on the subway.
Andrew Sean Greer: 2018 National Book Festival
Andrew Sean Greer discusses "Less" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Andrew Sean Greer is the best-selling author of five works of fiction, including "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. His new novel is "Less" (Lee Boudreaux), winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Greer lives in San Francisco. He has traveled to all of the locations in this novel, but he is only big in Italy.

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Mohsin Hamid | False Starts | Granta Magazine

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