Roy Miller's Blog, page 270
February 17, 2017
Irwin Stambler, 92, Dies; Reference Book Writer With Songs in His Heart
Holly George-Warren, who edited the second and third editions of “The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll,” said in an email, “I remember the Stambler book as being a valuable resource and a tool for fact-checking the entries in our own book.”
Mr. Stambler toggled regularly between science and music throughout his career. He worked as an engineer into the 1950s — designing aircraft parts, among other assignments — but then shifted full time into writing about aerospace and technology, as well as music and sports. He wrote for magazines like Space Aeronautics. He wrote newsletters. And he wrote dozens of books on subjects as diverse as the space program, drag racing, minibikes, the fastest humans, the X-15 rocket-powered aircraft, the pitcher Catfish Hunter and the basketball star Bill Walton.
By 1969, he had already written two music encyclopedias: one on popular music and a second on country, with Grelun Landon, a music industry executive.
Photo
The cover of Irwin Stambler’s “The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul,” which was first published in 1974.
Credit
St. Martin’s Press
In an unpublished memoir, Mr. Stambler said that he had wanted to write the rock encyclopedia in the 1960s but that his publisher resisted in favor of a somewhat tamer subject. So he wrote “Encyclopedia of Popular Music” (1965) instead, insisting, however, that he be able to sprinkle in some biographical entries on rock pioneers like Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. Haley actually did not end up in the book, but Presley did, as did rock ’n’ rollers like Fats Domino and the Everly Brothers.
Andy Leach, the senior director of library and archives at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, said that Mr. Stambler’s popular music encyclopedia was groundbreaking “because popular music wasn’t being taken seriously by most scholars or serious writers at the time.” The subsequent rock encyclopedia, he added, has become a “standard reference.”
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Irwin Stambler was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 20, 1924. His father, Sidney, owned a jewelry and silver fabrication company, and his mother, the former Bessie Levine, taught piano. He attended New York University, his time there broken up by two years of Army service during World War II, after which he returned and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering.
Music was always a passion. He preferred not to play classical piano, as his mother did, but he wrote pop songs with a partner, Morton Weinberg, with titles like “Strawberry Sky,” “Fade Out” and “Indigo Blue.” He built up a collection of close to 8,000 records and CDs.
The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock, and Soul
Irwin Stambler's passion for music inspired him to embark on a feat of research long before the internet. His encyclopedia, published by St. Martin's Press in 1974, offers a snapshot in time of famous artists and their careers. Here are a handful of entries.
“Music was always on at home,” Lyndon Stambler said. “Dad played guitar, and I made a harp in high school. He loved all music.
“Before my sister-in-law married my brother, one of the first images she saw of my dad was of him lying on his bed, wearing headphones and listening to Led Zeppelin. When she saw that, she knew everything was going to be O.K.”
In addition to Lyndon, Mr. Stambler is survived by his wife, the former Constance Lebowitz; another son, Barrett; two daughters, Amy Sprague Champeau and Alice Seidman; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
While Mr. Stambler was researching his pop music encyclopedia, he scheduled an interview with the songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen in Palm Springs, Calif., during time off from an aerospace meeting nearby. Mr. Van Heusen, who wrote the music for “Call Me Irresponsible” and other standards, kept filling Mr. Stambler’s glass with expensive whiskey while they talked.
“To this day, I can’t recall how I got back to my car,” Mr. Stambler wrote in his memoir. “All I know is that I woke up the next morning in bed with a miserable hangover but with a notebook filled with more than enough for a good encyclopedia entry.”
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Bringing down a president | Literary Hub
“…basically this is the explanation of how the Watergate story was developed by two young Washington Post reporters whose repeated double-byline on the front page of the paper was gleefully collapsed by their colleagues into ‘Woodstein.’
Woodward and Bernstein have their rewards — a Pulitzer Prize (awarded not to them but to their newspaper), considerable fame, a fortune in the making (Robert Redford has bought the movie rights to this book for a reported $450,000, and paperback rights brought a healthy $1 million), and the satisfaction of an important job done extraordinarily well. But their book is our reward — ‘we’ being reporters everywhere.
It is our reward because it demonstrates that American journalism can be, and in its crucial hour was, conducted with the highest standards of ethics, the greatest concern for public interest, and a near-suicidal commitment to the pursuit of truth and justice. Which is not to say that the protagonists here were saintly. They made errors of fact; in frustration they compromised at least one of their sources; they substituted political considerations for journalistic ones in determining whether and when to go with a story. The language in the Washington Post’s newsroom was often as salty as that in the Oval Office. But unlike the President’s men, the men and women of the Post treated the honor of their profession not as window dressing but as their stock in trade.
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“The book itself is a delight. It is next to impossible to write a first-person account in the first-person plural, and the writers adopt the happy expedient of writing in the third person, so that the references are to ‘Bernstein’ or ‘Woodward’ but never to ‘we’ or ‘us.’ The result allows for passages such as ‘Bernstein knew that Woodward couldn’t write very well. One office rumor had it that English was not Woodward’s native language.’
In the course of a gripping narrative, rather like a good detective story, we are treated to gossipy peeks behind the scenes of power in Washington. More important, we are treated to a detailed description of the process of digging out news in Washington that no one in authority wants to have dug out. White House complaints about ‘source stories’ — stories unattributed to named individuals — would have had us believe that the Post’s reporters were typical Washington ‘leaks’ being retailed by the President’s enemies. On the contrary, we learn, their sources were far from anxious to talk, hardly ever told all they knew, and had to be cajoled, pampered, browbeaten or tricked into talking at all. Only one source, the still-mysterious government official code-named ‘Deep Throat,’ had an overview of the situation, and even he would rarely go beyond confirming information the reporters had obtained elsewhere.
…
“One of the curiosities of the two reporters’ story is that it is as much a search for the right questions as it is a search for the answers. It took the reporters nearly four months before they began to ask themselves, much less anyone else, whether it was possible that the Mister Big of this plot could be the President of the United States.”
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Follett Taps George Coe as COO
Follett Corporation has appointed George Coe as chief operating officer for Follett and Baker & Taylor, effective March 31. Coe will report to Follett president and CEO Ray Griffith.
Coe has been with the company since April 2016, when he came on aboard as part of Follett’s acquisition of Baker & Taylor, where he served as president and CEO. As COO of Follett, Coe will, according to the company, develop and execute Follett’s business development strategies and initiatives while continuing oversight of B&T and Follett School Solutions, the company’s pre-K-12 business.
“George brings an outstanding track record of business leadership to Follett at a time of incredible growth potential for the company,” Griffith said in a statement. “Recognized inside and outside the company for his visionary thinking and operational results, George is the right leader to guide our business operations and deliver on this purpose.”
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Review: In ‘Big Little Lies,’ Monterey Moms and Their Clichés
From left, Shailene Woodley, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman in “Big Little Lies.”
Credit
Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/HBO
Speaking of “Big Little Lies,” HBO’s glossy new melodrama starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern, an HBO executive has said, “We’re not doing ‘Desperate Housewives’ here.” Maybe they should have thought harder about that.
Whatever surface advantage “Big Little Lies” may have in sophistication and seriousness over “Desperate Housewives,” it could have learned a few lessons from that long-running ABC potboiler in how to tell a story and keep an audience entertained.
Like “Desperate Housewives” in its first season, “Big Little Lies” (which begins Sunday and was based on a novel by the Australian writer Liane Moriarty) juxtaposes the mystery of a suspicious death with the seemingly perfect everyday lives of a group of mostly prosperous women. The main characters, all suspects in the mystery, are linked because their children attend the same progressive elementary school in Monterey, Calif., which is said to be “a private school at a public-school price.”
Their lives, of course, are anything but perfect, and the show’s drama comes from unspooling the tangles of violence, infidelity and frustration just below the surface. It doesn’t come from the mystery, which, through six of the season’s seven episodes, hangs offscreen like a dead fish.
The show’s writer, the veteran David E. Kelley, and director, Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club”), do not show the process of detection at all — no evidence, no clues, no cops showing up at inconvenient times. We don’t even know who’s dead, a cliffhanger (or red herring?) presumably saved for the last episode. What we do get are snippets of police interviews with a Greek chorus of minor characters — other parents from the school — who happily testify to the imperfections of the leads.
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Turning the mystery into such a complete MacGuffin as a way to foreground the domestic drama might make sense if that drama were, say, interesting. But the real problem with “Big Little Lies” is that the women’s stories, however well acted and artfully photographed, are just a compendium of clichés about upper-middle-class angst.
Not interested in the mom who’s bored with her husband and mired in a midlife crisis because she can’t have it all? (The original big little lie.) Then how about the control-freak Silicon Valley executive who goes ballistic when her daughter reports being bullied at school, the event that may or may not have led to the mysterious death? Or the abuse victim who’s reluctant to leave her husband, a subplot that’s more disturbing but also strays into “Fifty Shades” territory?
Ms. Witherspoon, Ms. Kidman and Ms. Dern do everything they can to bring their stock characters and situations to life, and from moment to moment they can be fun to watch. Ms. Dern is particularly sharp as the tech hotshot — she has just been named to the board of PayPal — who melts down as she finds she’s unable to protect her daughter, or even to figure out what’s happening to her.
All their characters, as well as that of a new, less wealthy mom played by Shailene Woodley, are self-consciously “rounded” — their Type A outbursts balanced by moments of humor and compassion. This is done so obviously that rather than making them more realistic, it just makes them more mushy and indistinct. If they’re so nice, why do they behave so badly to one another? The show is premised on the idea that that’s just the way it is these days for overstressed moms, which may be true in real life but isn’t, in itself, a satisfactory motivator for drama.
Ms. Kidman and Ms. Witherspoon are executive producers of “Big Little Lies,” and you can see what they probably thought they had — a sexy mystery-melodrama that would also be a commentary on issues important to women their age (40s). But the mystery is a sham, and the drama doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say. (The plot involving Ms. Kidman’s character and her violent, younger husband, played by Alexander Skarsgard, has a creepy energy, though. It’s as unoriginal as the other story lines, but it keeps you watching.)
Still, there’s value in a series in which at least one of these accomplished actresses is almost always onscreen. And there’s no shame in enjoying the lifestyle pornography. Setting the story in Monterey, a working-class tourist town, may not make much sense — the characters portrayed here would be much more likely to live up the coast in Woodside or Atherton — but it allows for many scenes to be shot in gorgeous oceanside homes. Visually, at least, “Big Little Lies” is the perfect television beach read.
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Margo Jefferson, Morgan Parker and More Discuss the Impact of Depression
Red Ink is a quarterly series focusing on women writers curated by Michele Filgate. The next event, which features Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos, Sarah Gerard, Marcy Dermansky, and Emily Raboteau, on literary misfits, will take place on February 23rd at powerHouse Arena. Below, recorded at a previous Red Ink, Margo Jefferson, Ruth Franklin, Elisa Albert, Morgan Parker and Bethanne Patrick discuss writing about depression.
Highlights from the conversation:
Elisa Albert: I think giving ourselves permission to experience the full spectrum of emotion, which is a permission often denied us by others and by ourselves, is often really just the release that’s necessary to make sure that the dark stuff doesn’t take up permanent residence in the body and in the psyche.
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Morgan Parker: I would say that the closest I get is in poetry because I’m not necessarily writing a sentence that describes my depression. There’s a way to embed anxiety and depression in word choice, in images, in things like that. I think that at least feels the most true because it is so complicated and layered and complex. I think poems really allow for that. There’s more that’s allowed, and it doesn’t make linear sense and neither does depression. It feels like an appropriate container.
Ruth Franklin: What someone was saying earlier about depression being a rational response to our circumstances is something that also appears in [Shirley] Jackson’s writing because she’s dealing so much with the experience of the women in her era and in her generation. I see her work very much as the counterpart to “the feminine mystique” and what others were trying to impose as the dominant narrative of what women were supposed to be like and what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be behaving. So the lack of reality and the instability and the rebellion in so many of her characters can be seen as a reaction against those social norms.
Bethanne Patrick: For years I thought that writing was wrong. I thought that writing made me a witch. I thought that it was something I shouldn’t be doing… To view writing as a therapy for depression took me a very, very long time. Now I do find that it helps me to write out my feelings rather than eat them or get further into depression. Depression makes it very difficult for you to see writing as that kind of therapy.
Margo Jefferson: There is time for despair because it can’t be avoided. We make time for it and then we find a way to convert the despair into language and action. There has to be time for all of those feelings because they can’t be avoided.
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February 16, 2017
George Saunders, Quite Possibly Colbert’s Favorite Living Author, Comes to the Late Show
The last time George Saunders sat down with Stephen Colbert, he was adamant about his utter lack of desire to write a novel—something the comedian and host ribbed him for last night on the Late Show, where the writer appeared to promote his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
Described as "quite possibly" the host's favorite living author, Saunders chatted with about the reason he decided to write a longform work of fiction, what exactly a "bardo" is, and what it was like to meditate on the life of Abraham Lincoln. Inevitably, the duo also discussed the presidency of Donald J. Trump and whether or not the American public is being "kind enough" to him during his first 100 days. "We have a president right now—" began Colbert.
Saunders, wryly, interjected: "We do?"
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30 Books in 30 Days: At the Foundling Hospital
In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 30 finalists. Today, NBCC board member David Biespiel offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
At the Foundling Hospital, Robert Pinsky’s compressed, resonant collection—part treatise on mixed registers of high and low language, part menagerie of narratives, part ceremony of names and songs, part documentary on improvisation and the lyric—is built around an archive of nimble, historical, and private evocations.
The poems explore. And by explore I mean they inspect, probe, and research; they draw from their materials, whether it’s an instrument, a name, a token, a haftorah portion, a city, a dream, a robot, or a language; and they complement those unearthed things with an enduring retrospection that comes from clear thinking, narrative directness, integrity, and a feel for the percussive incantation.
Pinsky’s juxtaposition of private life and the public life retell a familiar, essential story of the capacity to recognize how one’s lone struggle to comprehend experience is often resisted by one’s inability to unify all the particulars. I want to say this has been Pinsky’s concern for decades, in essence to speak in a poem in an idiom that is contemporary while also to compose and fashion a poem that evokes and relies on the traditions of the art.
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To illustrate: The central idea in this book, the one that makes the book immediate, if not essential, is, first, that the story of life is both the life and the telling of the life and, second, that the story of life is both the telling of the life and the interpretation of the life. Here are select lines and phrases from across the poems that illustrate these ideas—
Sweet vibration of / Mind, mind, mind… (“Instrument”)
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors… (“Creole”)
Found and to find… (“Names”)
Fragment of a tune or a rhyme or name / Mumbled from memory… (“The Foundling Tokens”)
I drank the shadows, I studied the shell… (“Genesis”)
. . . the person still makes / A shape distinct and present in the mind… (“Grief”)
Aspiring, beset by failures . . . (“Dream Machine”)
I see you . . . / Completely. Naked. I’ve got you in my pocket . . . (“Improvisations on Yiddish”)
At the end of the story, / When the plague has arrived, / The performance can begin . . . (“Ceremony”)
. . . Stubborn little light, as if / Hammered from living rock / I quarried out of myself — / Not much, maybe, but mine / Down to the bone . . . (“Light”)
I could go on. There is a great warmth and benevolence in these lines. Like the blues, they are evocations of marrow and truth but also a protest against them. They hold a generosity that acknowledges the role that an allusive—and also elusive—past, present, and future offer to a poet, even as Pinsky unfurls his resignation about the brevity of life.
Pinsky says that the “unforgivable days . . . open and close / One after another and swallow up the years.” If that suggests a not-so-feel-good rendition about aging, life entering its most reflective stage, time running out, then it’s one that leaks hope. Because: through hope comes a recollection of the forgotten, and through recollection of the forgotten comes affirmation of the pleasures of meaning and pleasures of living that persist. To read Robert Pinsky is to stay true to the smallest details, to the sensual and social landscapes, and to the montage of private dreams and public history.
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Cookbooks Preview: March 2017
A new way to look at dinner, a master class in the kitchen, and ruminations on food (and more) by the late Jim Harrisoin, are all coming in March.
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15 Ways to Earn Your Audience as a Writer
Your best and most noble path to developing an audience as a writer is by having something awesome (or many awesome somethings) to give them. Tell the best story you can tell. Above all the social-media posturing and brand building and outreach, you need a great “thing” (book, movie, comic, whatever) to be the core of your authorial ecosystem. Tell a great story. Achieve optimal awesomeness. Build audience on the back of your skill, talent, and devotion.
Here are 15 ways to develop an audience:
This guest post is by Chuck Wendig. Wendig is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, and the Heartland YA series, alongside other works across comics, games, film, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com, and his books about writing (including The Kick-Ass Writer). He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
1. Swift Cellular Division
The days of writing One Single Thing every year and standing on that single thing as if it were a mighty marble pedestal are long gone. (And, if you ask me, have been gone for a lot longer than everybody says—unless, of course, you’re a bestselling author.) Nowadays, it pays to write a lot. Spackle shut the gaps in your resume. Bridge any chasm in your schedule. This doesn’t mean write badly. It doesn’t mean “churn out endless strings of talentless sputum.” It just means to be generative. Always be writing.
2. Painting With Shotguns
The power of creative diversity will serve you well. The audience doesn’t come to you. You go to the audience. “One book is less likely to find an audience than three?” Correction: “One book is less likely to find an audience than two books, a comic, a blog, a short story collection, various napkin doodles, a celebrity chef trading card set, and hip anonymous graffiti.” Joss Whedon didn’t just write Buffy. He wrote films. And comics. And a webseries. The guy is all over the map. Diversity in nature helps a species survive. So too will it help the tribe of storytellers survive.
[How to Use of Short Fiction Strategically]
3. Sharing Is Caring
Make your work easy to share. This is triply true for newer storytellers: Don’t hide your work behind a wall. Make sure your work is widely available. Don’t make it difficult to pass around. I have little doubt that there’s a strategy wherein making your story a truly rare bird can serve you—scarcity suggests value and mystery, after all—but the smart play for creative types just setting out is to get your work into as many hands as possible with as little trouble as you can offer. This is true for veteran storytellers, too. Comedian Louis C.K. made it very easy to get his new comedy special on the web. And that served him well both financially and in terms of earning him a new audience while rewarding the existing audience.
4. Value at Multiple Tiers
Your nascent audience doesn’t want to have to take out a home equity loan to try your untested work. If you’re a new author and your first book comes out and the e-book is $12.99, well, good luck to you. Now, that might not be in your control, so here’s what you do: Have multiple expressions of your awesomeness available at a variety of tiers. Have something free. Have something out there for a buck or three. Make sure folks can sample your work and still support you, should they choose to do so.
5. Be You
The best audience isn’t just an audience that exists around a single work, but rather, an ecosystem that connects to the creator. The audience that hangs with a creator will follow said creator from work to work. That means who you are as a storyteller matters—this is not to suggest that you need to be the center of a cult of personality. Just be humble creator of many things. You’re the hub of your creative life, with spokes leading to many creative expressions rather than just one. Put yourself out there. And be you. Be authentic. Don’t just be a “creator.” You’re not a marketing mouthpiece. You’re a human. For all the good and the bad.
6. Engagement and Interaction
Very simply: Talk to people. Social media—though I’m starting to hate that phrase and think we should call it something like the “digital conversation matrix”—is a great place in which to be you and interact with folks and be more than just a mouthpiece for your work. The audience wants to feel connected to you. Like with those freaky tentacular hair braids in Avatar. Get out there. Hang out. Be you. Interact. Engage.
7. Head’s Up: Social Media Is Not Your Priority
Special attention must be paid: Social media is a side dish; it is not your main burrito. See #1 on this list.
[Emotion vs. Feeling: How to Evoke More From Readers]
8. Hell With the Numbers
Just as I exhort you to be a human being, I suggest you look at all those with whom you interact on social media as people, too. They’re not resources. They’re not a number. They’re not “followers”—yes, fine, they might be called that, but (excepting a few camouflaged spam-bots) they’re people. Sure, as you gaze out over an audience, the heads and faces start to blur together like the subjects of a pointillist painting, but remember that the audience is made up of people. And people are really cool.
9. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
An earnest plea to your existing audience to help you find and earn a new audience would not be remiss.
10. Share Knowledge
As you learn things about the process, share them with others. Free exchange of information is awesome. Be open and honest. Be useful.
11. Embrace Feedback
Reviews, critiques, commentary, conversation—feedback is good even when it’s bad. When it’s bad, all you have to do is ignore it. Or politely say, “I’ll consider that!” and in the privacy of your own home, shred the feedback with wanton disregard. When it’s good, it’s stellar and connects you all the more deeply to the audience. The audience is now a part of your feedback loop, like it or not.
[The Top 10 Elements of a Book People Want to Read]
12. Do Set Boundaries
That feedback loop is not absolute. I’m not a strong believer in creative integrity as an indestructible, indefatigable “thing”—but, I recognize that being a single-minded creator requires some ego. Further, the reality is that once something is “out there”, it is what it is and there ain’t anything you can do about it. So you have to know when to turn off comments, back away from social media, or just set personal and unspoken boundaries for yourself.
13. Don’t Wrestle Gators If You’re Not a Good Gator Wrestler
What I mean is, don’t try to be something you’re not. If you’re not good in public, don’t go out in public. If writing guest blogs is not your thing … well, maybe don’t write a guest blog. Again, this isn’t a list where you need to check off every box. These are just options. Avoid those that plunge you into a churning pool of discomfort. You don’t want to lose more audience than you earn.
14. Take Your Time
Earning your audience won’t happen overnight. You don’t plant a single seed and expect to see a lush garden grown up by morning. This takes time, work, patience, and, y’know, earning the attention of other fine humans one set of eyeballs at a time. It’s why you put yourself out there again and again.
15. Have Fun
Relax. Enjoy yourself. This isn’t supposed to be torture. You should have fun for two reasons: First, because people can sense when you’re just phoning it in, or worse, when you’re just moping. Second, because fun is fun. You should enjoy writing; enjoy putting your work out there.
In The KICK-ASS Writer, Chuck Wendig will show you how with an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience:
—How to build suspense, craft characters, and defeat writer’s block
—How to write a scene, an ending—even a sentence
—Blogging techniques, social media skills, and crowdfunding
—How to write a query letter, talk to agents, and deal with failure – and success!
—And more!
Click here to get your copy now.
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
You might also like:
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PEN World Voices to Focus on Literature in the Age of Trump
Patti Smith
Credit
Sebastien Bozon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The PEN World Voices Festival, which for the past two years has highlighted geographic regions like Africa and Mexico, will shift its focus this year to gender and power in the age of President Trump.
This year’s festival, which runs from May 1-7 in New York, will feature 150 writers in a series of talks, readings and workshops related to social justice, sexuality and politics.
Photo
Trevor Noah
Credit
Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated Press
“Amid visa bans and an America First foreign policy, PEN World Voices is now an important antidote to an America at risk of only talking to itself, fanning baseless fears, and damaging relations with allies around the world,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s executive director, said in a statement. “This year’s festival will center on both celebration and mobilization, rallying around PEN America’s mission to defend free expression and enable the breadth of voices vital to an open marketplace of ideas.”
The festival begins with “United Against Hate,” an evening of performance with the musicians Patti Smith and Ani DiFranco, as well as novelists including Colum McCann and Salman Rushdie.
Other highlights include a talk about cultural identity with the National Book Award-winning novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show.” And the reading “Literary Quest: Tenement Museum Edition” will feature the artist Laurie Anderson and the writers Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan and more, drawing inspiration from the museum’s history of New York’s immigrants.
The full lineup — which also includes appearances by Carrie Brownstein (“Portlandia”) and the cartoonist Roz Chast — and tickets are available at worldvoices.pen.org.
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