NYIH Conversations

Robert Cooverspoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, includingThe Public BurningandPinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992New York Timesessay. Coover established Brown University’s MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on experimental narrative and literary hypermedia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear a lecture on the revival of narrative in history by Laurence Stone. Professor Stone taught at Princeton from 1963 to 1990. He died in 1991. He is best known for his booksThe Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641,The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, andFamily, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visitnyihumanities.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author ofAbsolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America(2006),Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times(2012), andDirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, which won the Hillman Prize. In the fall of 2002 he spoke about his book with Eliza Griswold, author ofThe Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam(2010), andAmity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Institute fellow Ben Ratliff talks with Kelefa Sanneh about his new book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which tells the story of popular music during the past fifty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, is Luke Menand’s fourth book. His last, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. Menand is a professor of English at Harvard, and a staff writer forThe New Yorker magazine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caitlin Zaloom is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her first book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology From Chicago to London, an ethnographic study of the international financial system, appeared in 2006. Her second book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, was published in 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, and teaches in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. His memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Man in His Seventies, was published by Georgia University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelist and Institute Fellow Ben Taylor talks about Here We Are, a memoir of his friendship with Philip Roth. Taylor is the author of two previous memoirs--Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, and The Hue and Cry in Our House, which received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In addition to three collections of poetry, NYIH fellow Honor Moore is the author of several celebrated works of nonfiction, including The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margaret Singer by Her Granddaughter and The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir of her father. Her newest book is Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter Mid-Century. Here, she talks about the book, women's lives and second-wave feminism, writing a hybrid of biography memoir, and the experience of publishing a book in the middle of a pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biographer Benjamin Moser talks with Robert Boynton about the making ofhis 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which was awarded to Pulitizer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices