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Eat, Drink…and Be Literary
BAM offers civilized conversation and cuisine with culture’s brightest lights
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This spring, BAM continues the popular Eat, Drink and Be Literary series. These unique, intimate affairs include dinner (cost covers wine, tax and tip) with musical accompaniment followed by a reading and discussion with an established author. Find the perfect pairing for your palette below!
Nathan Englander
January 22 • Latin American Cuisine • Dinnertime performance by Di Wu on piano • Full Program
Nathan Englander’s highly anticipated and well-praised first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was released in 2007 after being ten years in the making. Englander is not the most lilting reader, but his passion for fiction and the writing process more than compensates. A professor at the Hunter College MFA program, Englander speaks to his audience like a teacher highly engaged in not only his subject, but also the learning process of his students.
Art Spiegelman
February 5 • Dinner TBA • Dinnertime performance by Kirsten Agresta on harp • Full Program
Art Spiegelman is the charismatic creator of comic books such as Maus, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Special Award. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s parents, Polish survivors of Auschwitz, with mice portraying the Jews and cats portraying the Nazis. He co-created the Garbage Pail Kids and, with his wife, co-created one of the most powerful images about September 11th for the 2001 cover of The New Yorker. Spiegelman, a veteran lecturer, will convince you that comics are nothing short of art.
Jimmy Breslin
February 19 • Middle Eastern Cuisine • Dinnertime performance by Glenn White on tenor saxophone, Roberta Piket on piano, and Gary Wang on bass • Full Program
Jimmy Breslin would rather have written his new book, The Good Rat, on a typewriter. He’s from the golden age of media when writers could really turn a phrase, when reporters pounded pavement instead of blogging from home. His fierce purveyance of opinion won him the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Expect some gritty tales of his days on the mafia beat and even dirtier language. Breslin is good friends with four-letter words.
A.M. Homes
March 12 • Irish Cuisine • Dinnertime performance by Carl Riehl on piano • Full Program
Provocative and dark are the most commonly used adjectives for the work of A.M. Homes. Her most recent novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, showed a turn toward optimism while preserving her dark humor. Homes’ memoir The Mistress’s Daughter concerns her adoption and search for identity. She also wrote for Showtime’s The L Word. Homes might be one of the busiest writers working today, and her talk is sure to take some interesting turns.
Germaine Greer
April 2 • British Cuisine • Dinnertime performance by Mathew Zalkind on cello and Evan Shinners on piano • Full Program
Feminist icon Germaine Greer earned notoriety with her 1970 book The Female Eunuch. Greer is a woman some love to hate and others adore. When it comes to female sexual liberation, she spurs the most controversial sides of the argument. Some of her once radical feminist ideas have become common viewpoints. Greer speaks her mind with complete conviction regardless of the popularity of her opinion, which should make for interesting after-dinner conversation.
Richard Price
April 23 • Italian Cuisine • Dinnertime performance by Mattias Jacobsson on guitar • Full Program
Richard Price writes novels, screenplays, and teleplays (if you haven’t seen The Wire yet, rent it now) about urban struggles. Lush Life, his most recent novel set in the Lower East Side, has garnered wide acclaim. Price’s work is often compared to Raymond Chandler’s for its stark portraits of city life and crime. His setting is most often New York City or Jersey, and he has worked with others who use the city as their muse, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. It’s heartening that someone out there is diligently documenting our daily world.
Ha Jin
May 7 • Japanese Cuisine • Dinnertime performance by Donald Vega on piano with Jason Stewart on bass • Full Program
Galvanized by the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, China-born author Ha Jin joined the ranks of writer-exiles turning to another language to write the stories of their native country. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and Jin took the PEN/Faulkner a second time for his novel War Trash. A professor of fiction at Boston University, Jin also travels extensively to lecture. His talks are illuminating as well as charming due to Jin’s characteristic humility.