Seattle Arts and Lectures (SAL) just released their new schedule for 2019/2020! And there are some really good authors on there!! Plus some authors I don't like that much!!! Well, really just one I don't like. But the rest of them are great!!!!
Let's take a look at some highlights.
Malcolm Gladwell kicks off SAL's Literary Arts Series on Sept. 23 with a reading from his new book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, which is good news for people who are into that kind of thing. To me, Gladwell represents the revival of the worst impulses in American storytelling and journalism. He is king of the metaphorically resonant but ultimately meaningless comparison, and he's obsessed with overblowing the claims of cherry-picked studies. Richard Posner called Blink "a series of loosely connected anecdotes, rich in 'human interest' particulars but poor in analysis," and the claim basically holds for all of Gladwell's other books. There should be a new John Waters-type law: "If you go home with someone, and they've got a bunch of Malcolm Gladwell books on the shelf, don't fuck 'em!" Unless you want to doom yourself to a life with someone who is content to describe the world using surface-level comparisons. That said, Kirkus gave his new book a starred review, so it'll probably read well.
But enough about that guy. Let's talk about someone who is good! All journalists secretly want to be novelists. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between The World and Me and We Were Eight Years In Power and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," is no different. His highly anticipated novel, The Water Dancer is due out in late September. It's an adventure novel about an enslaved man named Hiram Walker. If it's half as good as his journalism, it will be one of the best novels of 2019. Coates will come on Oct. 20, about a month after the novel's expected release.
Patti Smith is coming on Oct. 6! Many reviewers and people who grew up in the 1980s love the impossible coolness of this punk rock poet and memoirist. They thought that memoir about memory and being a regular person even though you are actually Patti Smith, M Train, was good. They ate up all the New York bohemian details about her early life with Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids. I like Horses, and that's about as far as I go, but I understand that she is an important and brilliant force in the world.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey won Pulitzer Prizes last year for breaking the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment story, which led to Ronan Farrow's story about the Harvey Weinstein rape allegations, which changed the way many journalists began writing about sexual harassment in the workplace. Their new book, She Said, is due out Oct. 1 of this year. The book gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at what it took for them to get the story in the first place and shows the hurdles they had to leap in order to publish it.
Mary Ruefle has a new book of poetry out from Wave Books. It's called Dunce. I read it over the weekend, and I am happy to report that Ruefle continues to be obsessed with using her signature conversational style to write abstract-associative poetry about death, loneliness, and poetry itself. Though I'm not as in love with Dunce as I was with My Private Property, it is still early on in my relationship with the book. Regardless, it's my understanding that Ruefle rarely leaves her home in Vermont, and so it's a rare joy to get to see her in person. So when she reads for SAL on Nov. 21, you'll want to make sure you're there.
As my colleague Jasmyne Keimig said in her review of the photo series, NTV AMRKN KRWN: Self Portraits in Sonnet Form, Natalie Diaz is a genius. Readers have been waiting for a follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec since 2012, and this is finally the year. Well, almost. Postcolonial Love Poem will hit the shelves in March of 2020. She published a section of the long poem in The New Republic, and it looks like a doozy about how fantastically fucked up we all are. "I learned Drink in a country of drought. / We pleasure to hurt, leave marks / the size of stones—each a cabochon polished / by our mouths," Diaz writes. She'll be here on May 7, 2020.
Here's the full schedule in chronological order. SAL will add two more speakers to their Journalism Series and one more speaker to their Women You Need to Know Series. Names have yet to be released.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Sept. 19, 2019
Poet, essayist, young adult writer, novelist, & editor of more than 30 books.Malcolm Gladwell
Sept. 23, 2019
New Yorker staff writer. Revisionist History podcast host. Best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and more.Patti Smith
Oct. 6, 2019
Poet & rocker—all tickets include a copy of her new memoir, Year of the Monkey (except Students/U25).Richard Kenney
Oct. 17, 2019
Pacific Northwest formalist & MacArthur “Genius.”Ta-Nehisi Coates
Oct. 20, 2019
The author of Between the World and Me—all tickets include a copy of The Water Dancer, Coates' first novel.Hanif Abdurraqib
Oct. 23, 2019
Poet, essayist, and music critic—author of Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
Amor Towles
Nov. 12, 2019
Best-selling novelist of Rules of Civility and Gentleman in Moscow.Mary Ruefle
Nov. 21, 2019
Wave Press poet, author of Madness, Rack, and Honey.Carmen Maria Machado
Jan. 24, 2020
National Book Award finalist for Her Body and Other Parties.
Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey
Jan. 29, 2020
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein case for the New York Times.Paisley Rekdal
Feb. 6, 2020
WA native & Poet Laureate of Utah.Min Jin Lee
Mar. 17, 2020
Author of Pachinko, the New York Times best-seller about four generations of a Korean immigrant family, fighting to control their destiny in 20th century Japan.Rick Barot
Mar. 19, 2020
Tacoma author of 4 books, including his latest, The Galleons.Carol Anderson
Apr. 15, 2020
Historian, educator, and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying our Democracy.Elizabeth Kolbert
Apr. 22, 2020
Spend Earth Day with journalist & author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.Maira Kalman
Apr. 29, 2020
Acclaimed writer, illustrator, and artist. New book: an illustrated edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Natalie Diaz
May 7, 2020
Author of When My Brother Was an Aztec and a new book, Postcolonial Love Poem.The Moth Mainstage
May 14, 2020
Each Moth Mainstage features simple, old-fashioned storytelling by five wildly divergent raconteurs who develop and shape their stories with The Moth’s directors.Luis Alberto Urrea
May 20, 2020
Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The House of Broken Angels, as well as 16 other books of fiction, essays, and poetry. Master storyteller. "Literary badass" (NPR)
