Ben Greenman, a very smart, witty, great guy and editor of the New Yorker appears in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Chicago very soon. (Schedule is below).
Q: WHAT ARE PARIS HILTON, OPRAH, JESSE JAMES, AND OTHER TOP CELEBS DOING IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE?
A: BEN GREENMAN PUT ‘EM THERE
This summer, the Brooklyn author and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman published “What He’s Poised To Do” (Harper Perennial), an emotionally powerful collection of short stories hailed as “astonishing” (by the Los Angeles Times), “at once weighty and genuine and light and breezy” (by the Miami Herald), and “a book so beautiful you’ll feel mysteriously compelled to mail it to a stranger” (by Bookslut).
Now, just three months later, Greenman is back with CELEBRITY CHEKHOV (Harper Perennial, Oct.), a book that is sure to be hailed as “strange,” “high-concept,” “at once a tribute and travesty,” and “rectangular.” In this book, Greenman has taken almost two dozen of the masterful short stories of Anton Chekhov and populated them with contemporary celebrities like Britney Spears, Conan O’Brien, Jay-Z, and Alec Baldwin. The result is an aggressive critique of our celebrity-besotted culture and an deeply unconventional, if also deeply genuine, homage to the lasting power of great literature. The stories are given new life, and the celebrities are granted an internal existence that is, all too often, denied them by the popular press.
Throughout, Greenman’s control of language and effect — not to mention Chekhov’s — is in evidence, and most of the stories end up being both side-splittingly surreal and genuinely moving. “These are stories I love,” Greenman says, “and celebrities I don’t, at least as they’re portrayed in the media. So I wanted to think of some way to combine honor and desecration. Let’s call it honocration.”
Beginning in October, Greenman will conduct a special pre-publication reading tour for CELEBRITY CHEKHOV. Dates for the mini-tour are below:
–Seattle, WA
University Bookstore, 4326 University Way
October 8, 2010
7:00 PM
–San Francisco, CA
Litquake / Latin American Club, 3286 22nd St.
October 9, 2010
8:30 pm
–Portland, OR
Powell’s, 1005 West Burnside
October 10, 2010
7:30 PM
–Chicago, IL
Borders, 2817 North Clark Street
October 14, 2010
7:00 PM
