Big Table

In Evelyn McDonnell’s The World According to Joan Didion, readers will find an intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of the revered and influential writer Joan Didion. As a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, Didion was a writer’s writer—a keen observer of life’s telling little details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouragin...

We have a special edition of The Big Table Podcast on today’s episode. Presenting Adaptation, the inaugural event of a new literary salon series and collaboration between USC’s Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab and Soho House. Adaptation will feature conversations between writers and screenwriters discussing the art of adapting books into TV and film. Up first, the Oscar-winning writer-director...

Prudence Peiffer’s first book, The Slip, is the never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there. For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a cluster of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of...

As we prime our book club model for post-COVID growth, we are programming a couple of longer late-summer episodes about our own books via Hat & Beard Press. To support Big Table or Hat & Beard, join our book clubs. You can find out more about them at hatandbeard.com. Your support fuels our books, podcasts, exhibitions, and events, and we thank you. On today’s episode of Big Table, we've recorded a...

File Under: Slime by Christopher Michlig — a cultural history of Slime — was recently published by Hat & Beard Editions. What is slime? We are well acquainted with its qualities in conjunction with certain things from which we tend to recoil but to which we are also at times attracted. Despite being everywhere, slime is a surprisingly unexamined cultural phenomenon. File Under: Slime collates a cu...

For Big Table episode 51, editors Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker discuss their latest book, Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter.  Is there a “Rosebud” object in your past? A long-vanished thing that lingers in your memory—whether you want it to or not? As much as we may treasure the stuff we own, perhaps just as significant are the objects we have, in one way or anothe...

We are on episode 50! Thank you all for listening along over the last couple of years. This one is special as it features a book published by Hat & Beard Press , one of Big Table’s main partners in cultural pursuits. dublab: Future Roots Radio is the long-awaited book telling the story of the pioneering online radio station through interviews, photos, art, and more. The dublab universe springs to...

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An Essay with Digressions   by Tim Carpenter is a book-length essay about photography’s unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. It’s also a book about photography theory, literary criticism, art history, and philosophy.  Drawing on writings and poems by Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Valery, Virginia Wolff, and other ar...

THE INTERVIEW: After 100 books on design, Steven Heller has given us a coming-of-age memoir. The award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the  New York Times has included 100 color photographs in  Growing Up Underground : A Memoir of Counterculture New York , a 224-page visually inspired tour of the center of New York City’s 1960s and ’70s youth culture. Steven Heller's me...

It is fitting that Bruce Adams’s new book, the sardonically-titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago and the Reinvention of Indie Music , begins at Jim’s Grill off Irving Park Road in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side: It was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, The Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired resta...

Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick’s best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinc...

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works celebrating the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. In this unconventional, illuminated biography, Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mos...

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”, or the power to talk to the dead, tell the futu...

The Interview: In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is  exactly  like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream. For Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all tha...

Nick Drnaso, acclaimed author of  Sabrina , is back with Acting Class , his third book on Drawn & Quarterly . A tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation, Acting Class brings together 10 strangers under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: They are all out of step with their s...

In her latest book, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me ( Grove Atlantic , 2022), Ada Calhoun traces her fraught relationship with her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared obsession with the poet Frank O’Hara. The book features exclusive material from archival recordings of literary and art world legends, living and dead. Having stumbled upon old cassette tapes...

In The Design of Childhood , acclaimed writer, architecture critic, and historian Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. Lange now turns her sharp eye to another subject we thought we knew. Chronicling the invention of the mall by postwar architects and merchants, Lange reveals how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural asc...

A 170-plus years ago, Henry David Thoreau began his legendary hermit walks in New England. Many of these walks were published later as some of his most cherished works as a naturalist: Walden , The Maine Woods , and Cape Cod. Artist, writer and New England native Ben Shattuck does the same in Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau , published by Tin House Books , which charts six journ...

To write about Tony Wilson, aka Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities, a clique of unreliable narrators, constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and the Haçienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy Division and New Order into the world as he pursued myriad other creative endeavors, appointing himself a cu...

Mark Rozzo’s astute and engaging new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1906s Los Angeles , published by Ecco Press , documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward in the heyday as New Hollywood’s It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of the Los Angeles scene in the Sixties. Rozzo poignantly captures the vivacity of the heady days in the early 1960s, jus...

The Episode J Dilla—aka James Dewitt Yancey or Jaydee as he was previously known—was a musical genius who was hardly known to mainstream audiences during his brief life.  In Dilla Time —equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history—hip hop historian and NYU professor Dan Charnas chronicles this musical outlier who changed popular music behind the scenes, working with renowned acts like D...

The Interview It’s not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years. Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when I was working for the indie record label Drag City. Keene had done the cover art for the Silver Jews’ A...

Adam Clair was barely out of undergrad when he began the manuscript for Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery (Hachette Books, 2022) . The book is a definitive history of the 1990s underground musical movement known as the Elephant 6 Collective. Founded by Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, and Jeff Mangum, who grew up as friends in the small town of Ruston, Louisi...

José Vadi grew up in California’s Inland Empire, but his roots go back to Puerto Rico and Mexico. His abuelo, or grandfather, was an Okie who hopped freight trains west to Nebraska and then on to California, the promised land.  Like many immigrants, he worked for a time as a migrant worker in the salad bowl of California’s agriculturally rich central valley, before settling down in the San Bernard...

The Interview: Although he did experience some fanfare in his lifetime, German writer, academic, and novelist W.G. Sebald—Max to his friends and colleagues—died 20 years ago in a car crash near his adoptive home in Norwich, England. He was only 58. His postmodern novels— Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn  and  Austerlitz —were written in quick succession in a period of less than 10 years...