Archive for the ‘Event’ Category

Attention English majors and desultory graduate students: your time has come. Our infrequent literary trivia night returns to McNally Jackson for a night of wine, revelry, and rhetoric. (more…)

Warm up with wine and the humiliation of your literary peers at the first “Nerd Jeopardy!” of 2012.

As always, three teams of three will compete for glory and prizes in a very familiar game show setting. Therein we’ll test everyone’s knowledge of literature and pop culture; even audience members will have the chance to win prizes.

If you’d like to compete, bring two friends, give your team a name, and drop it in the hat at the beginning of the night. We’ll select three teams at random. Everyone else can sit back, heckle, and enjoy the wine. Competing teams may also enjoy the wine.

Hosted by Ryan Chapman

FSG’s Work in Progress presents Nerd Jeopardy
McNally Jackson | 52 Prince St, NYC
Wednesday, Jan. 18th, 7pm

Facebook Event Details (including clues from the last Nerd Jeopardy)

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead ranges across America, from Christian rock festivals to Axl Rose, from unheralded blues musicians to the WB show “One Tree Hill.” (TIME‘s Lev Grossman calls Sullivan the next Tom Wolfe: “JJS, as I have come to think of him, may be the best essayist of his generation.”)

Sullivan’s book tour is taking him across the United States, during which he’s posting photos on Tumblr. A few highlights: (more…)

Nerd Jeopardy returns to the McNally Jackson basement to test your bookish acumen and ability to phrase answers in the form of a question. Wine will be served. This may help or hinder your chances.

Q. What is Nerd Jeopardy?
A. Glad you asked. Much like a certain game show, there will be a series of clues which contestants must guess to accumulate points in the hopes of winning. Unlike regular “Jeopardy!”, all of our clues concern books and pop culture, contestants play in teams of three, and everyone is encouraged to drink wine throughout.

Q. I want to compete.
A. In the form of a question, please.

Q. How do I compete?
A. Grab two friends, create a team name, and drop your name in the hat. We’ll pick three teams around 7:15pm. The winning team gets prizes, respect, and short-lived glory. If your team isn’t chosen, don’t fret. There will be audience prizes as well.

Q. Will you have Video Daily Doubles?
A. Indeed we will. With surprise cameos by an author or two.

Thursday, November 10th at 7pm
McNally Jackson in Soho
52 Prince St., NYC

Map | Facebook Details

The last Nerd Jeopardy went so well, we decided to bring it back for the annual Lit Crawl. It’s essentially a bar crawl with literary events added on top. As such, there will be a few key changes.

Firstly, this will be a condensed and very quick version of “Jeopardy!”, with only one round before Final Jeopardy. Second, we expect a slightly more tipsy crowd than usual, so heckling will be encouraged. Third, it will be in a bar.

If you haven’t been to our literary trivia night, the format is pretty simple. Imagine regular “Jeopardy!”, but excise the questions about psychics and European history. Add a few categories about books and pop culture, and let teams of three compete over glory, respect, and assorted prizes.

Update: contestants will be up against a formidable team of FSG authors: Will Hermes, Paul LaFarge, and Alina Simone. Combined they’re like Ken Jennings, if Ken Jennings graduated from an MFA program and went to rock shows.

Saturday, September 10th, 2011
310 Lounge
310 Bowery (between 1st and 2nd st.), NYC

Map | Facebook Details

We’d like to invite our New York friends to the third round of our semi-frequent literary trivia night. If you’ve ever wanted to scrap the “Jeopardy!” game show’s categories and replace them with questions about Proust, the New Yorker, and Jennifer Egan, this is the event for you. (You can also expect some pop culture thrown in for good measure.) And, who knows, there may be surprise appearances by notable local writers.

You can compete in a three-person team against two other teams for a chance at glory and modest prizes, or as an audience member in assorted speed rounds. One such example: “Hemingway Quote or Axe Body Spray Advertisement?”

Another advantage over the real “Jeopardy!”: we will have Terrazas wine for everyone, courtesy of Moët Hennessy. Hope to see you there.

Thursday, July 21st at 7pm
McNally Jackson in Soho
52 Prince St., NYC

Map | Facebook Details

At BookExpo America, the annual conference for booksellers, librarians and publishers, novelist Jeffrey Eugenides previewed The Marriage Plot, his much anticipated follow-up to Middlesex. (Astute Work in Progress readers may remember his conversation with editor Jonathan Galassi from our debut issue.)

The author shared the stage with Mindy Kaling, Diane Keaton, and Charlaine Harris. (more…)

The last week of April means two things in New York: inclement weather and the wonderful PEN World Voices Festival. There’s an entire week of diverse programming with celebrated authors from all corners of the globe, but the audience favorite would have to be the Moth storytelling night.

This year Jonathan Franzen shared an autobiographical anecdote about the dangers of using your life in your writing: (more…)

We invite you to join our second national teleforum, this time with John D. Kasarda, co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. The live event takes place Friday, April 15th, at 2:00PM EST / 11:00AM PST; participation is free.

As you may remember from our Justice teleforum in November, this is a new format for authors and readers to dive deeper into the book. Unlike a webinar, you don’t have to be tied to a computer to join—a phone is all you need.

Pico Iyer in Time recently called Kasarda’s aerotropolis one of “10 ideas that will change the world.” So, what is the aerotropolis?

In the 20th century, airports were built outside of cities, and roads connected one to the other. This pattern—city in the center, airport on the periphery—has shaped life across the globe.

Today however, jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks have turned the pattern inside out. A new urban form, the “aerotropolis,” has emerged, placing airports in the center with cities growing around them, connecting workers, suppliers, executives, and goods to the global marketplace. The aerotropolis model is re-shaping life in China and India, Seoul and Amsterdam, Dallas and Memphis, and it could be the economic answer for a city like Detroit.

(more…)

Mark your calendars: Nerd Jeopardy is back for round two. If you’ve ever sought public validation for your deep knowledge of obscure literature*, your time has come.

Since we had an overflow crowd at Lolita Bar, this time we’re taking over the great Housing Works Bookstore in Soho. We’ll provide wine and beer until it runs out, then it’s a cash bar. A cash bar that will make you feel good about yourself: all proceeds fight AIDS and homelessness.

There are two ways to participate. You can form a three-person team and compete for respect (and prizes of serious cash value) against two other teams. You can also play as an audience member during the speed quiz at intermission. Either way there should be plenty of glory and humiliation. In addition to said glory, winners will receive prizes from Housing Works and BOMB Magazine. And there just may be a surprise FSG author or two in the Video Daily Doubles.
(more…)

On February 8th, over a thousand people turned out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Cooper Union in New York. Paul Muldoon and Alice Quinn read selections from the New Yorker correspondence, and twenty poets shared their favorite Bishop poems.
(more…)

To coincide with David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, he’s asking readers to create their own entries in the style of the book. Here’s a preview of what we mean:

(more…)

I took a quick trip to Boston last weekend to produce our teleforum event with Harvard’s Michael Sandel and his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

By our accounts, the experiment was successful. If you’ve seen his TV series, you know about Sandel’s interactions with his audiences – he solicits audience members’ opinions and then explores the principles of justice below the surface – and this style translated seamlessly to the teleforum format.

Sandel polled the listening audience with questions about income distribution and, later, about affirmative action, then investigated people’s arguments through several exchanges with individual callers. Curious to see how it went? Listen below:

(more…)

I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt’s stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard’s home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught. Roland Barthes was one of them, as well as a longtime friend.

-Marion Duvert, Editor and Associate Director of Foreign Rights

Duvert: Samuel Beckett once wrote that there was no need of a story. Roland Barthes would have probably agreed with that, and yet I think I would like to hear it—the story of you and Barthes. How did you come to meet him? Did you meet the man first, and then the work? Or the work first, and then the man? (more…)

Would you sacrifice one life to save five? Is it okay to steal a drug your child needs to survive?

These are the questions Professor Michael J. Sandel poses in his legendary course and New York Times-bestseller Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

Sandel’s class on moral philosophy is consistently the most popular at Harvard, with over 1,000 students at a time. On November 7th, we’re taking his accessible approach directly to readers with a national, live, interactive format called teleforum. It’s a new form of the traditional author reading, one where readers can join in from anywhere in the country.

All you need to participate is a telephone. Broadnet‘s teleforum enables readers to interact with an author directly, answering his questions and responding with your own. Simply sign up in advance and we call you as the event begins. It’s completely free.

Sandel debating “The Moral Side of Murder”:

(more…)