Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have–a career in New York theater. For this first dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men.
November 6 @ 6:00 pm
Sydney Stern Launches Her Latest Book The Brothers Mankiewicz
November 7 @ 6:00 pm
Maya C. Popa reads from her debut collection of poems American Faith
“Maya C. Popa’s poems move with a confident, quick-as-dread sweep toward an alarmingly clear articulation of what it is to be an American ‘under/ duress by a language, its failure to imagine the present world or next…’ Her lyrics address our huge unknowns, when ‘The government is cancelled/ but not the body,’ tides of unsorted information threaten to sink us, and in the poisoned sea ‘the shame is that the parrotfish/cannot be remade from scratch.’ American Faith marries a richly detailed music to this careening hour.” —Mark Doty, author of Deep Lane
Maya Catherine Popa is a Romanian-American poet and author of two chapbooks, The Bees Have Been Cancelled and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, published in 2018 (DIAGRAM chapbook series). She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Hippocrates Society, and her writing has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, and Tin House among others. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, and she directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches English literature at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City.
November 19 @ 6:00 pm
Celebrate the re-publication of Wally the Wordworm with Anne Fadiman and illustrator Arnold Roth
A worm who lives on words, Wally finds himself starved for inspiration . . . until the day he slithers into a magical book: the dictionary. From this moment, he embarks upon a logomaniacal odyssey of epic proportions, munching on the likes of “eft” and “escalator,” “ptarmigan” and “sesquipedalian.” From Wally the Wordworm’s first publication in 1964, children and adults alike have been delighted by Wally’s wriggling through rhymes and words of increasing difficulty and complexity, his acrobatics whimsically illustrated by The New Yorker cartoonist Arnold Roth.
Genuinely fun to read aloud, and complete with an afterword by Clifton Fadiman’s daughter, Anne Fadiman, Wally the Wordworm instills in young readers a love of words and language and an early appreciation for their vast possibilities.