Anton Steinpilz offers a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of characteristics the neoliberal novel in The New Inquiry. He considers Ed Park’s Personal Days as part of that emerging project. “Here Park manages to articulate a narrative point of view you might call first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to great effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. The resonances with Tretyakov’s biography of the object are obvious; but whereas Tretyakov points toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with 21st-century work life. Tretyakov imagines a novel without a hero. Park imagines one without a reader.” For the entire essay, click here.
Category Archives: Authors/Artists
Check out this preview of Bathsheba Doran’s Kin in TimeOut NY
TimeOut New York’s preview of Bathsheba Doran’s Kin might help explain why we are so excited to have her read with FPP Harlem, if you don’t already know. “Doran’s effortless dialogue and finely textured moods evoke the sweeter end of indie cinema, so there’s little wonder she has a parallel career scripting HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and adapting The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for film. Kin, though, is stubbornly theatrical. Doran has written an intimate story by telling its nonintimate details, peripheral moments (like after-the-kiss debriefs with family members) that nonetheless coalesce into something penetratingly romantic. Much as she did in Parents’ Evening, in which a fought-over child never appeared, Doran has actually written around her story. This forces audiences into becoming complicit in imagining the central relationship. Doran’s diffidence has made its way into the weft of her written material.” For the entire preview, click here.
Tiphanie Yanique on BOMBLOG
Tiphanie Yanique was interviewed by Jack Palmer in the summer of 2010 for BOMBLOG. When asked why her characters are so unsure about their own history, she says: “In real life I think people do obscure their own pasts. I think we re-imagine our histories as our psyche permits, as our society permits, as our circumstance permits. What is real seems frighteningly and excitingly subjective. There is a truth that happened and then there are the truths of the experience of what happened. To appreciate this, all anyone has to do is ask a married couple about the beginning of their relationship. Often there are glaring conflicts at vital points in their versions of the story. It seems as though when it comes to our lives’ most important moments, we are bound to see them and re-see them via our particular vision.” Check out the entire interview here.
Our Readers for 4/23: Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, and Tiphanie Yanique
We are thrilled to announce the readers for our second FPP Harlem event: Bathsheba Doran, Ed Park, and Tiphanie Yanique.
Bathsheba Doran’s plays include KIN (Playwrights Horizons), Parents’ Evening (Flea Theater); Living Room in Africa (Off-Broadway for Edge Theater); Nest (commissioned and produced by Signature Theater DC); Until Morning (BBC Radio 4); adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations, The Blind and Peer Gynt; and her play for young audiences, Ben and The Magic Paintbrush (South Coast Rep). She is a recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, three Lecomte du Nouy Lincoln Center playwriting awards, a Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellow as and a Susan Blackburn Award finalist. Her work has been developed by MTC, the O’Neill Theatre Center, Lincoln Center, Sundance Theater Lab, and Playwrights Horizons. Ms. Doran studied at Cambridge and Oxford universities before working as a television comedy writer with the BBC. She is currently under commission from Atlantic Theater and Playwrights Horizons, and Schtanhaus in London. Her work is available from Samuel French and Playscripts Inc. She has adapted The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency for HBO Films and wrote on Season Two of the acclaimed Martin Scorsese/HBO Series BOARDWALK EMPIRE, for which one of her episodes received a WGA nomination.
Ed Park is the author of the novel PERSONAL DAYS, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He is a former editor of The Believer and the Voice Literary Supplement and is currently the literary fiction editor for Amazon Publishing. For more information on Ed Park, visit here.
Tiphanie Yanique’s story collection HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A LEPER COLONY was published by Graywolf Press in 2010. She is a fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing, the Boston Review Fiction Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Prize in Fiction. Her fiction, poetry or essays can be found in the Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, and other journals and anthologies. She has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers. Tiphanie is a professor of Creative Writing at The New School University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York. For more information on Tiphanie Yanique, visit here.
Join us Monday, April 23, 2012 @ 7 pm
Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
Harlem, NY
http://www.shrinenyc.com/
Margo Jefferson Riffs on FPP in Untapped New York!
Check out this great profile by Laura Itzkowitz on Margo Jefferson and the First Person Plural Reading Series in Untapped New York!
Thanks to Untapped New York for keeping their coverage local and always—cool.
Margo Jefferson Interviewed on The Aviary Online
Check out this great interview of Margo Jefferson by FPP Harlem co-founder Amy Benson in the February 2012 issue of The Aviary Online.
In the interview, Jefferson says:
If you love something aren’t you always conned by it? We claim not to believe the word “objective” anymore, we want to believe we can master it somehow. And yet we have to have some element of belief. Belief is surrender, it’s yielding up your capacities even to necessarily be on equal terms with something.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Opening Event: March 5, 2012 @ 7pm
Reply
Harlem, NEW YORK—The FPP Harlem Collective hosts the opening reading in the First Person Plural Reading Series at the Shrine World Music Venue, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson, novelist Sam Lipsyte, and cross-genre artists Mendi+Keith Obadike. The writers will read work written especially for the series, stories told from the “first person plural” or the “we” point-of-view. They will also read from other recent work. Admission is free.
Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton), Best African American Essays, 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of The Ask, Venus Drive, The Subject Steve and Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book of 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, N+1, McSweeney’s, Tin House, NOON, The Quarterly, Esquire, GQ and Playboy, among other places. He is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.
Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art, and literature. Their work has been commissioned The NY African Film Festival / Electronic Arts Intermix, Northwestern University, Bucknell University, The Kitchen, The Yale Cabaret, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Rhizome / The New Museum, and The Whitney Museum of Art. They have released two albums on Bridge Records, a book of poetry with Lotus Press, and two forthcoming artist books on 1913 Press. They are currently working on a new series of sound installations and touring their opera-masquerade Four Electric Ghosts. www.blacknetart.com
For more information, contact: fppharlem [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com
Venue:
Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
March 5, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/