At a reading for Central Park: An Anthology, outgoing parks commissioner Adrian Benepe and others remember the bad old days
Bio: Rachel Krantz is a freelance writer living in New York City. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, NPR, Nerve, and elsewhere.
"600 million dollars has been put into the park to make it safe, to make it the most beautiful park in the world," Benepe said. "It’s now a park that you can walk through at midnight and feel perfectly safe. If you had said that thirty years ago they would have said ‘What drugs are you on? Or what drugs do you want to buy?’ Now, of course, it’s glorious." More
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on June 20th, 2012 10:58am“I’ve never seen a human being look at paintings longer than Siri,” Auster told the Strand Books audience proudly. He recalled a time at the Prado museum when Hustvedt examined Francisco de Goya’s painting The Third of May for hours. She stared at it for so long, in fact, that she even managed to make art history. “I saw this foggy but present image of a—probably Goya’s face—in the canvas itself,” Hustvedt explained to the audience. “I wrote about it, and it turned out that this had never been seen before…. What’s most important isn’t that I found this face. It’s that most people—and so many people working in art, this is all they do—don’t actually look all that deeply at the paintings.” More
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on June 15th, 2012 4:09pm“When Spielberg was trying to convince me to write the movie," Tony Kushner said at a Pen World Voices event. "I thought, Why would you do this? As a friend of mine used to say: 'Stick your hand in a blender, it’s faster,'” Kushner said. “There are some human beings—Shakespeare, Mozart—that do things that defy human comprehension. They’re just better than us. Lincoln was one of them.” More
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on May 7th, 2012 5:24pmThe book Egan is referring to, of course, is her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. Because no prize was given for fiction this year, it looks like Egan will be getting another victory lap. It’s a book that’s often called experimental and genre-defying, perhaps because Egan never intended to call it a novel. “I’m still reluctant to use the word novel to talk about the book,” Egan told Weisberg. “But when the hardback didn’t sell for four months, the publisher informed me we were going to call it a novel when it came out in paperback. And that it wasn’t a question, it was a fact.” More
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on May 7th, 2012 11:10amLuckily for the audience at Housing Works Bookstore, the Colesberry essay was the only phallic fodder read Wednesday night. That’s probably because all of the other selections from The Best Sex Writing 2012 were written by women. Journalist Amanda Marcotte read her defense of SlutWalk, the protest movement which fights the idea that women who dress provocatively are asking to be raped. Marcotte told the audience that Rush Limbaugh’s comments had given SlutWalk’s cause an unexpected gift. More
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on April 26th, 2012 11:06amFingal opened the McNally Jackson reading with the first query he sent to D’Agata. “I’m new to this, so bear with me,” Fingal read. “I’ve discovered a small discrepancy between the numbers of strip clubs you say there are in Las Vegas and the number that’s given in your supported documents. I’m wondering how you determined there were 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas when the source you quoted says there are 31.” “I think maybe there’s some sort of miscommunication," D’Agata read in reply, "because the 'article,' as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t need a fact-checker. I have taken some liberties in the essay here and there, but none of them are harmful.” More
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on April 19th, 2012 11:57am
