Big Table

Interview:  As one of the most influential book editors of his generation—first at Simon & Shuster and then, for many years, at Knopf and Random House, Robert Gottlieb has lived a charmed life. He was also one of the few storied editors of The New Yorker  in the 1990s. Gottlieb’s other two passions are modern dance and cinema: He helped program the George Balanchine Theatre for decades from his ed...

After seeing Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas,” writer and professor Emily Rapp Black felt an intense connection with the famous Mexican artist—maybe one of the most recognized faces in the world.  Rapp Black has been an amputee since childhood. She grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned to hide her disability from the world.  Kahlo, too, was an amputee, having sustained...

Jason Jules is a writer, blogger, stylist, brand consultant, and devotee of the Ivy look, albeit in a quite subverted form.  The face of Drakes of London and writer of the John Simons documentary film A Modernist , Jules is widely recognized as the most stylish man in London media and culture. Described by Complex magazine as having a style akin to a “living, breathing jazz song,” he is also the c...

The Interview:  Los Angeles is a hundred suburbs in search of a city, or so it’s been said. In his new book about Los Angeles, novelist and nonfiction writer Rosecrans Baldwin—a somewhat recent transplant to Los Angeles from the East Coast—tackles the famous quip and expands on it. His premise in Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles ( MCD/FSG, 2021 ) is spot-on: “Functionally...

The Interview: Dave Hickey was an inspirational character—a writer of essays and songs, an astute art and literary critic, a one-time gallerist and, certainly, an art-world provocateur. Hickey published his two most famous books in the 1990s, The Invisible Dragon —a call to reconsider beauty in art—and Air Guitar, a cult classic essay collection that exposed the more personal and venerable style o...

The Interview:    Like many readers in the States, I first became aware of Norman Ohler’s work after reading Blitzed (2015) , his epic history of drug use in the Third Reich.  The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ), Ohler’s follow up—which came out in paperback in the States last year—was born from some of the research he was doing fo...

The Interview: Musician Warren Ellis’ first book, Nina Simone’s Gum ( Faber & Faber , 2021), is a magical journal mixing memoir, cultural history, reportage, and travelogue. The memorable title comes from the Meltdown Festival, a concert series his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, curated in London in 1999 that featured a rare live performance by Nina Simone herself. After her set, Ellis rushed th...

The Interview: For over 50 years, Joan Didion, a daughter of California, has been in a league all her own, as a writer and novelist. Unlike many critics, she is capable of writing memorable fiction that, although not as widely read as her reportage and singular essays, stands the test of time.  The Library of America Series recently published their second Joan Didion volume featuring the novels  D...

The Interview: Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a talent agent and screenwriter. One of his childhood heroes was the doomed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930s to eke out a living as a screenwriter while he labored on what ended up being his fourth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. A few months shy of his 40th birthday, Specktor mov...

The Interview:  Kyle Beachy has been skateboarding for as long as he’s been creating stories. For him, the two have always been intertwined. After releasing the coming-of-age novel The Slide in 2009, he began to write more seriously about skateboarding, as aficionado, critic, and essayist. A decade’s worth of this material is now included in The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central Publishing) , his seco...

The Interview: With the world leaders of the G20 having met about climate change last week and the upcoming United Nations climate summit happening in Scotland this week, we’re airing our conversation from a few months back with journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, who began to more steadily research and write about the environment after moving with his wife to New Orleans a few years after Hur...

The Interview:  Peter Mendelsund began his career as a concert pianist, and reinvented himself as a graphic designer, now creative director, almost by accident. He came to book design—first as a reader, then as an independent bookstore employee, and ultimately, as a book cover designer, which he practiced full time at PenguinRandom House. He is presently the Creative Director of The Atlantic , and...

The Interview: On this episode of Big Table, artist and photographer Jona Frank talks with J.C. Gabel about her visual memoir,  Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined ( Monacelli Press ), which documents, in elaborately staged sets, her troubled childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey. Frank’s mother suffered from mental illness, as did her brother, who was eventually diagnosed with schizop...

The Interview: On this episode of Big Table, J.C. Gabel talks with We Transfer co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Damian Bradfield about his first book The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet (Penguin Press) , which imagines and outlines a path toward a better internet experience than exists today. Bradfield knows that most of the big data being compiled online is m...

The Interview:  In  Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (The University of Chicago Press) , William Sites brings the cosmic musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961, he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold...

Episode 16: Lucy Sante THE INTERVIEW Since her debut book, Lowlife: Lures and Snares of Old New York , Lucy Sante has charted her own path, not only as a writer of distinction, but as a writer who has created a genre all her own in the process. Her books include The Other Paris , a sequel of sorts to Lowlife ; a memoir, A Factory of Facts ; a book on Folk Photography and Evidence , about crime sce...

The Interview:   Brigitte Benkemoun, an investigative reporter in France, buys a vintage address book online for her partner, and soon discovers that it belonged to artist/photographer Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress, infamous “weeping woman,” and unsung hero of the surrealist movement. Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, An Address Book, A Life ( Getty Publications ) is Benkemoun’s study of Maar’s legacy...

The Interview:  Yuval Taylor’s dual biography Zora & Langston ( Norton ), documents the lives, times, and work of novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and poet and writer Langston Hughes, two towering pillars of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. Taylor writes about their intimate (and productive) friendship, their falling out with one another (and their patron), and the regret the...

THE INTERVIEW Photographer Janette Beckman and artist/art director Cey Adams (who helmed the art department at the legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Records in its 1980s and '90s heyday) discuss their graffiti art and photography collaboration  The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists , which was staged as an exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles a few years ago and...

The Interview: In  Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him  ( University of Chicago Press ) ,  Italian curator Mariella Guzzoni unpacks her year’s long research into the books that Vincent Van Gogh read throughout his life and how they influenced and inspired his painting and drawing, letters, and purpose in life.   The Reading: Guzonni reads from The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh...

The Interview William Deresiewicz documents “how creators are struggling to survive in the age of billionaires and big tech,” which is the subtitle of his masterful new book, The Death of the Artist ( Henry Holt ). This book is a well-written examination of the creative economy, and how it has been hollowed out and de-monetized by tech spin and greed; the toxic nonsense otherwise known as “the gig...

The Interview: Geoff Dyer discusses “ Broadsword Calling Danny Boy”: Watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’, published by Pantheon , his study of the 1969 action film featuring  a young Clint Eastwood in one of his first starring roles, alongside Richard Burton .  The Reading: Dyer reads from his latest book See/Saw: Looking at Photographs , his collection  of writings over the last two decades on and about...

The Interview: Two distinguished Orwell scholars, John Rodden and D.J. Taylor, unpack the Orwell enigma: fact, fiction, myth and the most enduring legacy of any writer in the English language since Shakespeare.  Rodden’s most recent Orwell book is Become George Orwell ( Princeton University Press ) and Mr. Taylor’s is a study of Orwell’s most famous book, On Nineteen Eighty-Four ( Abrams Press ) T...

THE INTERVIEW Journalist, author and biographer and Mary Gabriel discusses Ninth Street Women , published by Little, Brown , a five part biography of painters from the Abstract Expressionist era: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. This door-stopper is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand American art.  THE READING For the reading...

The Interview:  Biographer Colin Asher, discusses the legacy of one of the greatest unknown American writers, Nelson Algren, a pre-Beat Generation realist who also took the Underground Man to new heights in the 1930s thru the 1970s, writing from the working man and woman’s perspective in Chicago and elsewhere. Here, he discusses his definitive biography, Never A Lovely So Real ( Norton ). The Read...