He’s framed a ticket to the World Series game Sandy Koufax did not pitch and a sheet of Freud’s stationery on which the great man did not write. In the second of a two-part episode recorded at JCC Manhattan, Jonathan Safran Foer describes the pleasures of the non-event and the joys of possessing archaeological … Continue reading »
Monthly Archives: July 2017
Episode 179: Jonathan Safran Foer, part one
By letting us not only understand but inhabit its characters, does a novel reveal the commonality of human experience or demonstrate our differences? Both, of course, but Jonathan Safran Foer is particularly sympathetic to the former. In the first of a two-part episode recorded at JCC Manhattan, we discuss the joys of intimacy and … Continue reading »
Episode 178: Hallgrímur Helgason
Iceland is a paradise for writers, with its highly literate population, generous government grants and total absence of cockroaches. Unfortunately there are only 330,000 Icelanders, so even if they all buy your book your horizons are limited. Fortunately that’s why the novelist (and print-maker, and translator and more) Hallgrímur Helgason visited America. A conversation at the … Continue reading »
Episode 177: Paul Shaffer
For 33 years, he was David Letterman’s music director and comic sideman, a career that began in Canada with the Toronto production of Godspell, as did those of Gilda Radner, Martin Short, and Andrea Martin. Some production! Some careers! And now what? What do you do when your job ends after three decades? Savvy … Continue reading »
Episode 176: Joshua Ferris and Jim Shepard
If you want to write about the Arctic, must you visit the Arctic? The splendid writers Jim Shepard and Joshua Ferris think not. Are they asserting: write about what you don’t know? It’s complicated. And delightfully so. A conversation about actual landscapes and landscapes of the imagination, at the Center for Fiction, with music … Continue reading »