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Appel Salon | Jay Baruchel

"We're only as good as our rivals." —Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel appeared at the Toronto Reference Library to discuss his memoir Born Into It with Dan Robson.

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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld on "You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories"
Curtis Sittenfeld on "You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Rich Fahle.

A suburban mother of two fantasizes about the downfall of an old friend whose wholesome lifestyle empire may or may not be built on a lie. A high-powered lawyer honeymooning with her husband is caught off guard by the appearance of the girl who tormented her in high school. A shy Ivy League student learns the truth about a classmate’s seemingly enviable life.

Curtis Sittenfeld has established a reputation as a sharp chronicler of the modern age who humanizes her subjects even as she skewers them. Now, with this first collection of short fiction, her “astonishing gift for creating characters that take up residence in readers’ heads” (The Washington Post) is showcased like never before. Throughout the ten stories in You Think It, I’ll Say It, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships, and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided.

With moving insight and uncanny precision, Curtis Sittenfeld pinpoints the questionable decisions, missed connections, and sometimes extraordinary coincidences that make up a life. Indeed, she writes what we’re all thinking—if only we could express it with the wit of a master satirist, the storytelling gifts of an old-fashioned raconteur, and the vision of an American original.
Natasha Trethewey: Monument
Join two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey as she unveils Monument, her first retrospective, which features new work as well as poems selected with care from each of her four previous collections. In being drawn forth from an “opus of classics both elegant and necessary,” each poem weaves and interlocks with those that came before it, and those that follow. Throughout the collection, too, winds the poet’s own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love—in terms that have, across Trethewey’s already monumental career, helped us change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future.
Fatima Farheen Mirza on "A Place For Us: A Novel" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair
Fatima Farheen Mirza on A Place For Us A Novel at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Rich Fahle.

The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth, A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging

As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?

A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.

A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
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.
Patrick deWitt | eh List
The eh List Presents Patrick deWitt for his novel French Exit

In conversation with journalist Nathalie Atkinson
Appel Salon | John Irving | December 4, 2018
"Well, in the case of The World According to Garp, I thought I was taking sexual hatred, sexual intolerance, sexual discrimination to truthful extremes... What disheartened me in re-reading the novel 40 years later is how I couldn't find the exaggeration. It seemed to me to be closer to reading a newspaper than I normally like. It seemed to me that what I thought was extreme has not only not gone away, it has become commonplace." —John Irving

John Irving appeared at the Toronto Reference Library to discuss the 40th anniversary of his seminal The World According to Garp with Sam Tanenhaus.
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.
The Peacemakers with Bruce Jentleson
Bruce Jentleson discussed his new book "The Peacemakers," which he researched while the Kissinger Chair in the Library's John W. Kluge Center. The book explores how a variety of 20th-century leaders rewrote the scripts they were handed to make breakthroughs on issues long thought intractable.
Rebecca Skloot on “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”
Extended discussion with author Rebecca Skloot, author of the best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Johns Hopkins University announced plans this week to name a new research building after Lacks, an African-American woman who permanently changed modern medicine nearly 70 years ago when it was discovered that her cells could live forever. These “immortal cells” have helped scientists produce remedies for numerous diseases, including the first polio vaccine, that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But Lacks’s cells were taken without her consent when she was a patient at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in 1951.
An Xiao Mina & Paul D. Miller | Memes to Movements
Digital media scholar An Xiao Mina and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) sit down to discuss how meme culture shapes politics today. Mina's new book is "Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power."

Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics. She finds that the "silly" stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the international Women's March.

Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. Activists in China evade censorship by critiquing their government with grass mud horse pictures online. Meanwhile, governments and hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, and misinformation. Botnets and state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse and distract internet communities. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement.

Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended—when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors—Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

An Xiao Mina is an American technologist, researcher, and artist. She served as a contributing editor for the book Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters, and her own work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the US and around the world. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Wired, the New Inquiry, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, and Hyperallergic. A 2016-17 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and product director at the technology company Meedan, her home is wherever the Wi-Fi is.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is a composer, multimedia artist and writer. His written work has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, among others, and he is the Editor of Origin Magazine. Miller’s work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. Miller has written the award-winning book Rhythm Science, Sound Unbound, and The Book of Ice, an experiential visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic.
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.
Luis Alberto Urrea: 2018 National Book Festival
Luis Alberto Urrea discusses "The House of Broken Angels" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Luis Alberto Urrea is a best-selling author of poetry, fiction and essays. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Urrea is also a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. His published works include "The Devil's Highway: A True Story," "Tijuana Book of the Dead," "Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life," "Queen of America," "The Hummingbird's Daughter" and "The Fever of Being." His most recent book, is "The House of Broken Angels" (Little, Brown).
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.
Reniqua Allen | It Was All A Dream
In It Was All a Dream, Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point.

Interweaving her own experience with those of young Black Americans in cities and towns from New York to Los Angeles and Bluefield, West Virginia to Chicago, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity. Instead of accepting downward mobility, Black millennials are flipping the script and rejecting White America's standards. Whether it means moving away from cities and heading South, hustling in the entertainment industry, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality, or building activist networks, they are determined to forge their own path. Compassionate and deeply reported, It Was All a Dream is a celebration of a generation's doggedness against all odds, as they fight for a country in which their dreams can become a reality.

Join us as Reniqua Allen discusses her new book with Rebecca Carroll, Producer of Special Projects at WNYC!

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