Paragraph Events

Brian Sack & Sherri Rifkin

This monthly Paragraph reading series features the writing of its members. Join us for incredible writing by Brian Sack and Sherri Rifkin. Free and open to the public.

]]> Brian Sack is the author of In the Event of my Untimely Demise. He has written humor for a variety of publications that people have been known to read. He regularly appears as the ombudsman on CNN Headline’s "Glenn Beck" program and soon will also be regularly appearing as a humorist on "Not Just Another Cable News Show", as long as it doesn't get canceled. His Web site, Banterist.com has been praised for not sucking. He is the voice of talk show host Mike Riley in "Grand Theft Auto IV".

Sherri Rifkin is a former TV marketing executive where she writes for a variety of entertainment and media clients, including Bravo, USA Network, and the Style Network. Her first novel, LoveHampton, will be published by St. Martin’s Griffin Press this month. She is the author of a number of Web, newspaper and magazine articles as well as two non-fiction books. She is currently at work on her second novel.

Paragraph Founders' Reading

Paragraph founders Lila Cecil and Joy Parisi take the stage at this first ever Paragraph Founders' reading. Please come out for what's sure to be a wonderful night of fiction. Free and open to the public.

]]> Paragraph founders Lila Cecil and Joy Parisi are both fiction writers who received their MFAs from The New School. On May 9, they will be taking a break from troubleshooting wireless problems, fixing the plumbing, adjusting the air conditioning and changing lightbulbs to read from their short story collections.

Paul Henry, Owen Sheers & Richard Gwyn

Paul Henry is one of Wales’ leading poets. The author of six collections of verse, his work has been widely anthologized. Originally a songwriter, Henry has read at festivals across the UK and Europe. He has lectured at the University of Glamorgan and guest-edited Poetry Wales. A popular Creative Writing tutor, he currently presents the Inspired series of arts programs for BBC Radio Wales. Of Henry's latest book, Ingrid's Husband, The Times Literary Supplement said, "...the haunting music, the cherished objects, the blank landscape of beaches, 'the missed trajectories' of space and time all amount to a book which finds, like William Carlos Williams, its brightness in bits of broken glass and fragments of the marvelous."

Besides being an award winning poet, Owen Sheers' has garnered intense praise for his first novel, Resistance. The Guardian calls it a, "remarkable first novel...at once a brilliant and sometimes frightening thriller, and a mature exploration of human blur and compromise. Sheers treads his tricky path with infinite subtlety." Sheers' two collections of poetry, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill, have won many awards including, Forward Prize Best 1st Collection 2001 and the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award. The Dust Diaries, Sheers' first nonfiction book set in Zimbabwe, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005.

Richard Gwyn was born in Pontypool, and grew up in Crickhowell, South Wales. Gwyn's poetry includes One Night in Icarus Street, Stone Dog, Flower Red, Walking on Bones and Being in Water. As Kirkus Reviews says of his work, "He lends each situation an air of mystery and offers layer upon layer of speculation, a kind of reverse archaeology, as to what will happen next . . .Gwyn truly shines in the sensuous details he imparts to each simple act." He is also the editor of an anthology of new poetry from Wales titled The Pterodactyl’s Wing: Welsh World Poetry. He has been a regular columnist for Poetry Wales, writes book reviews for The Independent. His first novel, The Colour of a Dog Running Away, set in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, has been translated into several languages. He will read from his second novel, Deep Hanging Out.

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."

Kelly Braffet, Peter Selgin and Karen Moulding

Kelly Braffet is the author of two novels, Josie and Jack and, most recently, Last Seen Leaving. In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly described her second novel as "brilliant," replete with "fluid prose, vivid characters and suspenseful twists," and Library Journal hailed it as a "solidly crafted and compelling...effort, which will secure the author's place as a novelist of note." Ms. Braffet is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, and teaches novel writing at the Sackett Street Writing Workshop in Brooklyn.

Peter Selgin is the author of By Cunning & Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers, forthcoming in February from Writer’s Digest Books. His stories have appeared in literary journals Glimmer Train, The Sun, The Missouri Review, and The Bellevue Literary Review, among others, and are forthcoming in anthologies Our Roots are Deep in Passion, and Best American Essays 2006. His novel, Life Goes to the Movies, was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. His short story collection, Nothing but Water, was short-listed for the Iowa Fiction Award in 2005. He leads a writing workshop in Vitorchiano, Italy, and is co-editor of Alimentum, the only literary journal all about food.

Karen Moulding has written three novels, including The Naked Shopper, Unbox and The Untrainable Heart. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Woman in the Window, a fiction anthology, as well as The Piedmont Review, and Spectrum. She has been awarded several fellowships from The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and earned an MFA in Fiction and a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. She is author of the biannually-updated legal treatise Sexual Orientation and the Law. In her free time, Karen likes to go-go dance, and she can be seen every Tuesday night at Happy Ending shaking her stuff.

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.

Mohammed Naseehu Ali and Wyn Cooper

Mohammed Naseeu Ali is the author of The Prophet of Zongo Street, a dazzling collection of stories that mixes myth with modernity. O Magazine described the stories as "rich and resonant…haunting and ultimately hopeful in their commitment to the truth." The New York Times Book Review hailed the collection as "moving, subtle and ingeniously constructed." Ali's fiction and essays have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Mississippi Review, Bomb, Gathering of the Tribes, and Essence. He is also a well-known musician recently featured on NPR. Take a listen.

Wyn Cooper has published three books of poems, The Country of Here Below, The Way Back, and Postcards from the Interior, as well as a chapbook entitled Secret Address. According to poet Jane Hirschfield, "Wyn Cooper's superb postcard poems, deft and exemplary, say just enough, and never too much." His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Agni, Verse, Fence, and more than 60 other magazines. His poems are included in 20 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, Ecstatic Occasions, and Expedient Forms. His poem "Fun" was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song "All I Wanna Do." Novelist Madison Smartt Bell's CD Forty Words for Fear is also based on Cooper's poetry, and according to Esquire, it's "sonic moonshine." Check it out.

Darcy Frey and Alan Burdick

Darcy Frey is the author of The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, which was named a "Notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times Book Review and "arguably the best sports book ever written" by The Village Voice. Described by The Chicago Tribune as "a brilliant portrait of what has gone wrong in our cities, and by extension, in our country." His journalism has won many awards including: The National Magazine Award, The Livingston Award, The Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service from the Society of Professional Journalists as well as inclusion in the Best American Essays 1994 and Best American Science Writing 2002. One of his cover stories for The New York Times Magazine, "Something's Got to Give," was made into the feature film Pushing Tin by Twentieth Century Fox. Frey's second book, George Divoky's Planet, will be published by Pantheon.

Alan Burdick is the author of Out of Eden which was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Awards and a winner of the 2005 National Outdoor Book Awards. The Boston Globe hailed it as "One of the most comprehensive and readable accounts . . . for people trying to figure out how our species fits, or doesn't, into the natural order, there is no more interesting subject than the blending of the native and the exotic. And no more interesting an introduction than this fine book." Alan writes for numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, GQ, Natural History, and Discover, where he is a senior editor. Alan's work includes entry in the 2003 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology; winner of the 1995 AAAS Westinghouse prize for magazine feature-writing, and co-recipient of the 1992 Olive Branch Award.

David Gates and Jonathan Ames

David Gates has published two novels, Jernigan and Preston Falls and a short story collection, The Wonders of the Invisible World. Jernigan was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and both Preston Falls and Wonders for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. According to Amazon.com, "David Gates writes practically perfect American stories. Perfect, first of all, in their staid adherence to American short-story tradition… [In] The Wonders of the Invisible World, it's all Updikean adultery, Cheeveresque drinking, some drugs, a life-altering accident or two. But Gates's stories step beyond being perfect examples of their form to become something fresh, compassionate, and witty. He has an astonishing handle on the way people talk, not just to each other, but to themselves." He’s published short fiction in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His journalism and criticism has appeared in such publications as The New York Times , The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone among others.

Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir!, and the essay collections What's Not to Love? and My Less Than Secret Life. He is the editor of Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. A new book of essays, I Love You More Than You Know, will be published in January 2006. Booklist writes, "Ames writes edgy, punchy, sexy, funny, and extremely eloquent prose, and it is no wonder he has developed cult status." He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a former columnist for New York Press. Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man are in development as films, with Mr. Ames writing the screenplays. Mr. Ames performs frequently as a storyteller and comedian and has been a recurring guest on the Late Show with David Letterman.

Marian Fontana and Elissa Schappell

Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award and selected as both a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. A.M. Homes raves, "Use Me screams Read Me. In these tens stories Elissa Schappell captures the devastinging absurdity, the dark comedy that is conteporary life. It is the family stripped bare, sex and death, and other nervy tall tales. This is serious stuff and it's seriously funny." Elissa Schappell is also founding editor of Tin House.

Marian Fontana is the author of A Widow's Walk: A Memoir of 9/11 which was excerpted in Vanity Fair, has been nominated for a Books for a Better Life Award and was featured in People Magazine's top 10 Books of the Year. Publishers Weekly writes, "September 11, 2001, was the eighth anniversary of Fontana's wedding to firefighter Dave; Dave's last call to her was from the World Trade Tower site after the first plane crashed; he promised to call back in 20 minutes. The first chapters of this book follow the grim days of waiting and hoping almost hour by hour, then chronicle the first few of an endless succession of wakes and funerals. With its built-in drama and pathos and excellent pacing, this book should bring Fontana to the attention of talk shows nationwide."