Events

B.J. Novak is an actor, writer and comedian, best known for his contributions to Emmy Award-winning comedy ‘The Office’. In addition to starring as Ryan, the temp-turned-boss-turned-temp, Novak also served as an executive producer for the series and scripted many of the show’s most memorable episodes. Novak has also been featured in films such as Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed WWII epic, Inglourious Basterds.

First discovered as a stand-up comedian, Novak continues to perform live at theatres, clubs, and universities. For this event, he will be workshopping his first book, a work of comedic fiction, scheduled to be published by Knopf in 2014.

Dr. Heidegger or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (with Darren Frey)

Both folk psychology and actual empirical research suggest that technology impacts our ways of thinking. Heidegger anticipates such speculation by reflecting on the essence of technology. Instead of merely positing correlations between technology's prominence and certain modes of thinking, he suggests that one's very posture toward the world is brought into question and sometimes framed by technology. The urgent questions, Heidegger argues, do not take the correlative form: eg., Does Facebook weaken one's actual social attachments? This talk will present the questions concerning technology that Heidegger thought were most important while outlining the general contours of his own thought. So it is open to anyone regardless of their background in philosophy.

In collaboration with the NYU Creative Writing Program, we are delighted to present two brilliant American writers.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye (Riverhead), a memoir about grief, and the poetry collections Once and Halflife (W.W. Norton). A former poetry editor for The Paris Review, she is also a culture critic for Slate magazine and a founding editor of the web site Double X. She is the recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, 32 Poems, and more. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up.

Chris Adrian is the author of a short story collection A Better Angel, and three novels, Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and The Great Night. He has received an NEA grant for fiction writing and a Guggenheim Fellowship, was selected as one of The New Yorker's 20 writers under 40, and recently completed training as a Fellow in Pediatric Hematology Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is currently the Warren Adler Visiting Writer in the NYU Creative Writing Program.

http://www.cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/home NYU Creative Writing Program website

In collaboration with NYU, we are delighted to present Nathan Englander.

Nathan Englander is the author of the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, the novel The Ministry of Special Cases, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, Spring 2012). His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories. Translated into more than a dozen languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

ZZ Packer is the author of the short story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004. Her nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine,The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer, and Salon. She was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine and one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of two books of poems: Interior with Sudden Joy and Human Dark with Sugar, which won the 2007 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in Bomb, Conjunctions,McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from The Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, The Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, the Greenwall Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She is the Poetry Editor of Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books and currently teaches at Princeton University and NYU.  She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

Children’s Hour – music, rhythm and stories for kids: Bring your children (2-6 year-olds, siblings welcome too) to the library at Shakespeare and Company for an hour of music, songs and stories in English (for all nationalities, even those who don't speak English). Led by the magic Kate Stables, mum and singer/songwriter from This is the Kit, this lovely event is fast becoming an institution. There will be instruments to play and a lot of noise to make! Four euros donation appreciated.

In collaboration with NYU, we are thrilled to present their Distinguished Poet-in-Residence, Charles Simic.

Charles Simic has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, among them Jackstraws, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times; Walking the Black Cat, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; A Wedding in Hell, Hotel Insomnia, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Selected Poems: 1963-1983 and Unending Blues. He has also published many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry, and four books of essays including Orphan Factory. Elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000, his many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.