Live at Politics and Prose

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Ottessa Moshfegh: Live at Politics and Prose Aug 03, 2018

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The unnamed narrator of Moshfegh’s compelling and unsettling novel is a woman who has everything: looks, a brand-new degree from Columbia, a job at an art gallery, an Upper East Side apartment, and a substantial inheritance. But her fairy-tale existence feels cursed. In 2000, she decides to escape her life by taking enough drugs to sleep through it all for a year. Aside from the psychiatrist who writes the prescriptions, she sees only a college friend and a boyfriend. Her plan works for a while, then a new drug, Infermiterol, causes strange and frightening blackouts and the narrator must face what it is she really needs. As she did in Eileen, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, Moshfegh writes with both humor and an unflinching attention to parts of life we’d rather not see, but can’t look away from. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525522119 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Terrance Hayes: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 27, 2018

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Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these charged sonnets mark “the umpteenth slump / In our humming democracy, a bumble bureaucracy.” Angry, sarcastic, and playful, Hayes explores, reinterprets, and riffs on the meanings of “American,” “assassin,” and “future.” Notable Americans he turns to include James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison, but he also has to reckon with “James Earl Ray Dylann Roof... /…George Zimmerman John Wilkes Booth.” The author of acclaimed books including Hip Logic, How to Be Drawn, and the National Book Award-winning Lighthead, Hayes has consistently been one of the most innovative and technically accomplished poets, and here he brilliantly reinvents the Renaissance sonnet as a specifically “American sonnet that is part prison,/part panic closet …/that is part music box, part meat/grinder,” because, as he says, “when the wound/ is deep, the healing is heroic.” https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780143133186 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beck Dorey-Stein: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 20, 2018

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A self-described political outsider, Dorey-Stein came to the Obama White House via Wesleyan, teaching high school English in Hightstown, New Jersey, and Craigslist. She worked as a White House stenographer from 2012 to 2017, and her memoir engagingly captures her many trips with the presidential entourage, recorder mics in hand. Dorey-Stein also introduces her colleagues, among them the dedicated political insider she fell in love with. Conversational and witty, this compulsively readable memoir evokes the glamour, intrigue, and drama of a Washington gone all too soon. Dorey-Stein is in conversation with Julie Pace, Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated Press. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525509127 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 13, 2018

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The Clash was a paradox of revolutionary conviction, musical ambition, and commercial drive. We Are The Clash is a gripping tale of the band's struggle to reinvent itself as George Orwell's 1984 loomed. This bold campaign crashed headlong into a wall of internal contradictions, and rising right-wing power. While the world teetered on the edge of the nuclear abyss, British miners waged a life-or-death strike, and tens of thousands died from US guns in Central America, Clash cofounders Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, and Bernard Rhodes waged a desperate last stand after ejecting guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon. The band shattered just as its controversial final album, Cut the Crap, was emerging. Andersen and Heibutzki weave together extensive archival research and in-depth original interviews with virtually all of the key players involved to tell a moving story of idealism undone by human frailty amid a climatic turning point for our world. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781617752933 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abdi Nor Iftin: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 06, 2018

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No two immigration experiences are the same, and Iftin’s amazing story of chance, courage, and resilience began years before he came to the U.S. Growing up in Mogadishu, he was five in 1991 when Somalia plunged into civil war. He escaped the hunger and militia attacks temporarily by watching American movies and listening to American pop music. But as he learned English, reinvented himself as "Abdi American,” and reported for NPR, he drew the enmity of the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab and was forced to take refuge in Kenya. Then, after a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi, Iftin was granted a visa to enter this country. He now lives in Maine and works as an interpreter for newly-arrived Somalis. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781524732196 This event is supported by the Young African Professionals (YAP) Network. YAP is a network of more than 10,000 young African professionals in the D.C. Metro area, which provides a forum for professionals interested in Africa to engage with contemporary leaders in business, technology, philanthropy and social entrepreneurship; to network and discover opportunities among Africans; support Arts and culture from the African Diaspora; and promote entrepreneurial activities among members. More information about YAP can be found on their website at yapdc.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Carreyrou: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 29, 2018

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Theranos, founded in 2003 by nineteen-year-old wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes, promised to revolutionize blood testing by developing technologies to miniaturize samples and so make testing fast, easy, and inexpensive. It seemed too good to be true—and was, as Carreyrou, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, revealed in a series of detailed articles. Undaunted by pressure from the company’s CEO and lawyers, Carreyrou raised enough doubts about Theranos policies, procedures, and promises that by 2015 Holmes and her corporation were being investigated by a host of medical authorities, investors, state attorneys general, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others. Here Carreyrou recounts his riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781524731656 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yrsa Daley-Ward: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 22, 2018

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In her second book, Daley-Ward combines the haunting lyricism of Bone with passionate, unsparing prose to tell the story of her life. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Daley-Ward was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in Chorley, a small town in the North of England. Along with family tensions—a father she was often afraid of, a mother she saw worn down, and a brother she was estranged from—Daley-Ward confronts abuse, depression, racism, and the tremendous power of sexuality. Fearless in confronting and chronicling her own pain, Daley-Ward is also attuned to joy, and her writing, like that of Rupi Kaur, sings as artfully as it rages and laments. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780143132622 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lauren Groff: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 15, 2018

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Groff has been one of our most exciting contemporary fiction writers since her phenomenal 2008 debut, The Monsters of Templeton. Her most recent novel, Fates and Furies, was a National Book Award finalist, Barack Obama’s favorite book of 2015, and one of the most talked-about novels in years. Now, Groff returns with a collection of eleven shimmering stories. The book opens with an unnamed woman escaping her family for a walk. She sets out after dark, interested in the moment when “a second neighborhood unrolls atop the daytime one.” In the narratives that follow, Groff maps this overlooked terrain. Conveying a landscape of sinkholes and storms that’s as much emotional as it is natural, she delves into the lives of people looking for options, from a homeless woman to a woman so conflicted about her husband and children that she’s lost track of what “home” means. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781594634512 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Kuttner: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 08, 2018

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Kuttner’s astute analysis of the post-war “golden age” starts with measures including the New Deal and the Bretton Woods Agreement, showing how they allowed democracy and capitalism to be mutually supportive and thrive. The balance began to slip in the 1970s; as financial regulations were rolled back and taxes cut, inequality worsened, and frustrated voters turned away from progressive agendas, a right-wing turn that has led us to Trump, Brexit, the precarious state of the European Union, and the rise of nationalisms. Both democracy and capitalism are now foundering and Kuttner, cofounder and co-editor of The American Prospect, asks whether this dissolution was inevitable or if we can use the lessons of the past to re-establish the former harmony. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780393609936 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yanis Varoufakis: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 01, 2018

Show notes

In his eye-opening memoir, Adults in the Room, Varoufakis, Greece’s former Finance Minister, recounts his frustrating struggle to resolve Greece’s debt crisis without resorting to austerity measures. His book give us a valuable inside look at discussions with officials of the European Union and International Monetary Fund as well as with policy makers in Washington and other capitals. Founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, an international grassroots organization dedicated to restoring democracy to Europe, Varoufakis as a father is all too aware of the legacy today’s fraught economic policies will leave to the next generation. Couched as a series of fatherly letters, Talking to My Daughter about the Economy is an accessible primer on the history, elements, ideals, and problems of economics, including issues of inequality, climate change, and the chronic risk of global instability. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780374538057 https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780374272364 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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