Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes and musical guest Howard Fishman
Amy Hempel is the author of the short story collections Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. According to The New York Times, "Hempel writes with an effortless wit...showing us the larger shapes of our lives by capturing their most fleeting and fragmentary moments." Novelist Jim Shepard calls Hempel "one of our masters of offhandedly rendered dire emotional states. Her fiction is breath-catchingly tender and funny...spectacularly intimate and beautifully built, and brings us back to the question that powers all her work: Can we take each other in?"
A.M. Homes is the author of the novels, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, Jack, and This Book Will Save Your Life, as well as the acclaimed short story collection The Safety of Objects, and the artists' book Appendix A. Her work has been translated into eight languages and is widely anthologized. According to The New York Times, Homes "writes not only of the sterility but of the dark nightmare corners of suburban life. That life offers no safety, even, or especially, in the suburbs, would be a reasonable point. But there is far more to Homes....Strangeness becomes a revealing back entrance into the human condition of our day." Homes' fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in numerous magazines including Art Forum, Bomb, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, Mirabella, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair.
Howard Fishman has recorded five critically acclaimed CDs, Howard Fishman Quartet Vol 1 and 2, I Like You a Lot, Do What I Want, and Look at All This. He made his debut at The Algonquin Oak Room in 1999 and has since headlined in major venues in the U.S. and abroad, including The Steppenwolf Theater, The Blue Note, NJPAC, MassMOCA, Stamford Center for the Performing Arts, The Bottom Line, Le Petit Journal, and Joe’s Pub. The All-Music Guide has called him, "an important force in creative music," and The New York Times has written that his work, "transcends time and idiom." Howard has been a featured guest on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, World Café with David Dye, and The Leonard Lopate Show.