Paragraph Events

Roberta Lawrence, Neal Ungerleider & Bruce Ward

Paragraph's monthly reading series at KGB showcases our members' work. Join us in February for a reading by Roberta Lawrence, Neal Ungerleider and Bruce Ward. Free and open to the public.

]]> Roberta Lawrence's writing appears in Bomb, Shoot, Musician, ASCAP in Action, Screen Magazine, and on Blue Note CDs. Roberta is the recipient of a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for her fiction. Her short story "A Princess Comes to Chelsea," received a New Voices Award from the Writer's Voice in New York City. She has had multiple residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Neal Ungerleider reports on the Middle East, Africa, and Asia for Fast Company Magazine. His articles have been published in Slate, Foreign Policy, Wired and Saveur.

Bruce Ward is a writer, actor, director and teacher. He has performed his acclaimed solo show Decade: Life in the '80s across the U.S., including in NYC at the HERE performance art cafe and the NYC International Fringe Festival. Bruce has Master's degrees from the New School and Boston University and has thrice been a fellow at VCCA. He is currently working on a memoir, Last Man Standing.

February Agents Roundtable

Join literary agents Seth Fishman and Kirby Kim for an open discussion on representation, publication, and the book business. Free and open to Paragraph members only.

]]> Seth Fishman joined The Gernert Company in 2010 after beginning his career as an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Born in Midland, Texas, he graduated from Princeton University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. His interests are wide-ranging, but they boil down in particular to literary and commercial fiction, popular (fun) science, young adult, humor, sci-fi/fantasy and graphic novels (of both a traditional and literary bent). Clients include Tea Obreht, Kate Beaton, and Bill Willingham.

Kirby Kim was an assistant at the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency before he moved on to Vigliano Associates, where he built his list while negotiating the agency's contracts. He is currently at WME where he continues to represent fiction for children and adults, memoir, pop culture, and general nonfiction. Kirby is originally from California, where he attended Pomona College in Claremont and Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He is on the boards of the Asian American Writers Workshop and Kaya Press.

Granta Launch Party

]]> Granta's 115th Issue: The F Word (Feminism)

In a rare opening of the writers' space to the public, Paragraph hosted a party to celebrate the launch of Granta's Feminism Issue with Granta editors John Freeman and Patrick Ryan and authors Julie Otsuka and Taiye Salesi.

Meena Alexander & Christian Barter

Meena Alexander was born in India and raised both there and in Sudan. At eighteen she went to England to study. She has published six volumes of poetry, most recently Quickly Changing River (Triquarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2008). Her book Poetics of Dislocation appears in the University of Michigan, Poets on Poetry series, 2009. She has received awards from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations, and from the Rockefeller foundation for a residency at Bellagio. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Christian Barter’s first book of poems, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, North American Review, The American Scholar and other magazines, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and in 2008-2009 he was a Hodder Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. He is the supervisor of the trail crew at Acadia National Park.

Hannah Tinti & Lynne Tillman

Hannah Tinti is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine, for which she won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award, and winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.

Lynne Tillman wrote the novels American Genius, A Comedy; Haunted Houses;Motion Sickness;Cast in Doubt;and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tillman has published three nonfiction books, includingThe Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-67, and three story collections, most recently This Is Not It, stories and novellas written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her fiction has been included in numerous anthologies. In 2006 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Matthew Zapruder, Darin Strauss & Timothy Donnelly

Darin Strauss is the international bestselling author of the New York Times Notable books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and the national bestseller More Than It Hurts You, now out in paperback. Also a screenwriter, he is adapting Chang and Eng with Gary Oldman, for Disney. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU's creative writing program.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of the poetry collections American Linden, Come On All You Ghosts (2010) and The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. Luxbooks has also published a graphic novel version of the poem "The Pajamaist." He is also co-translator from Romanian of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker and the Best American Poetry 2009 anthology.

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit and poetry editor of Boston Review. New work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Harper's, jubilat, The Nation, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Richard Todd & Andrew Sean Greer

Richard Todd is the author of The Thing Itself, hailed by Ward Just as a "a splendid book, brimming with wit and original insights." Richard has spent many years as a magazine and book editor at The Atlantic Monthly, The New England Monthly, Worth, Civilization, and Houghton Mifflin, and he now works independently as a consultant. He has written scores of articles on a wide range of cultural themes for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others. He is a professor at Goucher College.

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel," and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chicago Tribune while garnering many other coast-to-coast honors. His ﬁrst novel, The Path of Minor Planets and his story collection, How It Was for Me were also published to wide acclaim. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and other national publications, and have been widely anthologized. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco.

Daniel Wallace & Anthony Schneider

Daniel Wallace is the author of Big Fish, hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as "a refreshingly original debut," and described by Brightleaf as "Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Rowan and Martin." His most recent novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, which Library Journal called "a masterly novel about love and illusion, friendship and sacrifice," is just out in paperback. His children’s book, Elynora, was recently published in Italy, and his illustrations will be featured in a book by George Singleton coming out this fall called Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Anthony Schneider, a master of the short-short, has been published in McSweeney’s, The Reading Room, The Believer, Details, BoldType, and Mid-American Review. A Pushcart Prize finalist, his fiction has been included in the anthologies The Encyclopedia of Exes and The Literary Insomniac. His tightly woven stories contain revelation upon revelation. He is also, the author of Tony Soprano on Management, which has been published in six languages. Raised in South Africa, he now lives in New York City.

Matthew Klam and Nam Le

Matthew Klam is the recipient of an O'Henry Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a PEN/Robert Bingham Award, and has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is the author of the short story collection Sam The Cat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year as well as a New York Times Notable Book. According to Esquire, "few short story writers are funnier than Klam. Few are so horribly true." He was also hailed as one of the Twenty Best Fiction Writers in America Under Forty by The New Yorker. He is a contributing writer to GQ Magazine and has taught creative writing in many places including University of Michigan and American University. He is a visiting professor at Southampton College in New York and he lives in Washington, DC.

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. His debut collection of stories, The Boat, will be published by Knopf in 2008. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, Best Australian Stories 2007, Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space and One Story. He is currently the fiction editor at the Harvard Review.

Peter Godwin & Anne Landsman

Peter Godwin's latest book, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa came out to rave reviews. The New Yorker calls it, "a powerful narrative of grief and desperation, both personal and national." Publishers Weekly describes Godwin's work as, "a tour de force of personal journalism." Godwin is the author of five other critically acclaimed nonfiction books including, Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, Wild at Heart: Man and Beast in Southern Africa, and The Three of Us: A New Life in New York which received the George Orwell Prize as well as the Esquire/Apple/Waterstones Award. As an award-winning foreign correspondent, he has reported from more than 65 countries and served as an Eastern European and diplomatic correspondent for The Sunday Times of London. He was the chief correspondent for BBC's Assignment and is also a documentary filmmaker and screenwriter. His documentary on the sex trade in Thailand, The Industry of Death, won the gold medal for investigative film at the New York Film Festival.

Anne Landsman's critically acclaimed debut novel, The Devil's Chimney, was nominated for the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, QPB's New Voices Award and South Africa's M-Net Book Prize. The New Yorker compares her prose to Alice Munro and her vision to J. M. Coetzee, saying, "Landsman's hold on the crux of her story is so steady and strong that her fey, haunted characters seem to act entirely out of their own compulsions." Publishers Weekly says her book evokes, "rigidly observed sociological hierarchies...with cinematographic clarity and poetic grace." Her just to be released book, The Rowing Lesson, has caught the attention of Oprah and authors such as Jennifer Egan who claims "Landsman is one of the few writers of our generation to have wrested from the English language a voice uniquely and searingly her own." Landsman has published interviews, reviews, essays, and stories in The Believer, The American Poetry Review, Bomb, Poets & Writers, and The Washington Post. She has also written screenplays including the motion picture adaptation of The Devil's Chimney and Honest Arrogance, a film about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Originally from South Africa, she lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Alison Lurie & Kate Blackwell

Alison Lurie is the author of nine novels including Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize, The Truth About Lorin Jones, which won the Prix Femina Etranger, and Truth and Consequences. Ms. Lurie has also published Women and Ghosts, a collection of supernatural stories; Familiar Spirits, a memoir of the poet James Merrill; and The Language of Clothes, a study of the psychology of fashion. She has written two collections of essays on children's literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and three books of traditional folktales for children. Three of Ms Lurie's novels—Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates, and Imaginary Friends—have been adapted for television. She has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation grants, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita at Cornell University where she has taught literature, folklore, humor, and writing. She spends part of the summer in London and much of the winter in Key West, Florida. She is married to the writer Edward Hower and has three grown sons and three growing grandchildren.

Kate Blackwell's story collection, You Won’t Remember This, was published in June 2007. Novelist Howard Norman says, "Kate Blackwell has what Flannery O’Connor called ‘a talent for humanity.’ ... In each story, Blackwell looks at life with a direct gaze and she writes with elegant measured tones and with beautiful melancholy humor." Novelist Robert Bausch calls the book, "an extraordinary collection of stories all having to do with what is too often hushed in the human heart; it is full of characters you come to care for and trouble for which you cannot easily choose sides."

Helen Schulman & Jeffrey Frank

Helen Schulman is most recently the author of A Day at the Beach. "Schulman's triumph here is that she breaks our hearts," raves The New York Times. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novels, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P.S. was made into a feature film starring Laura Linney. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review. She is presently the Fiction Coordinator for The New School's graduate writing program.

Jeffrey Frank is a senior editor at The New Yorker and author of the highly praised novels The Columnist and Bad Publicity. David Sedaris hailed his most recent novel, Trudy Hopedale, as "Another triumph from one of America's most reliable and inventive comic novelists... understated, cunning and relentlessly funny."

Abigail Thomas and Heather Abel

Abigail Thomas is the highly acclaimed writer of three books of short stories, Herb’s Pajamas, Getting Over Tom, and An Actual Life, as well as two memoirs, Safekeeping, and most recently, A Three Dog Life. Stephen King has hailed her most recent work as, "The best memoir I have ever read. It’s sad, terrifying, and scorchingly honest. It’s also a testament to the power of love, suggesting that even when love isn’t enough…somehow, it is. This book is a punch to the heart." Thomas teaches fiction writing in the graduate program at The New School and lives in Woodstock, New York.

Heather Abel is finishing a novel about faith, place and family set in Colorado and California. Abel has worked as an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and a reporter covering mining and other western issues at High Country News, a Colorado-based regional newspaper. She completed an MFA in creative writing at The New School, where she now teaches creative non-fiction. Her most recent essay, "Emily," published in The Friend Who Got Away, was featured in the New York Times as "obviously winning," among the essays in the acclaimed collection. Currently, she lives in both Massachusetts and New York.

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.

Katherine Lanpher and Melissa Bank

Until last year, Katherine Lanpher was the celebrated co-host of The Al Franken Show, the flagship talk show of Air America Radio. Her memoir, Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move, describes Lanpher's move from the Midwest to New York City to join Al Franken on his radio show. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described the memoir as "poignant" and written with "unconcealed wonder," and Kirkus marveled at Lanpher's "startling insight." Prior to her career in broadcasting, Lanpher worked for 16 years as an award-winning columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, after which she became the host of Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning show.

Melissa Bank is the author of the bestselling short fiction collection, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Her latest book, The Wonder Spot, is a collection of young women's coming-of-age stories that is "enthralling, engaging, and deserving of...notice," according to Entertainment Weekly. Bank has been called, "prodigiously talented" by both the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post. She was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction. Her work has been published in Zoetrope and The Chicago Tribune, and has been aired on Selected Shorts on NPR.