BAM and the National Book Awards present nine acclaimed authors for Eat, Drink & Be Literary, Jan 23—Jun 5

Ninth annual literary-dining series features Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, Nell Freudenberger, Jamaica Kincaid, Junot Díaz, Alison Bechdel, Richard Russo, and Keith Gessen & Masha Gessen

Moderators are Deborah Treisman, Phillip Lopate, and Harold Augenbraum

Bloomberg is the presenting sponsor for Eat, Drink & Be Literary

“Expertly produced…bottomless and quite good wine.” —The New Yorker

Brooklyn, NY/November 29, 2012—Following the success of eight previous sold-out seasons, BAM and the National Book Awards are pleased to present the 2013 season of Eat, Drink & Be Literary, featuring an extraordinary roster of literary legends and genre innovators, including two Pulitzer Prize winners. Beginning in January and running through June 2012 at BAMcafé, the series features leading contemporary authors reading from their work and discussing their writing process. These events offer literary devotees—writers and readers alike—the chance to socialize and enjoy a delicious meal before the readings in an informal setting that encourages discourse and an appreciation of exceptional writing.

Doors open at 6pm and the events begin at 6:30pm with live music and wine followed by a buffet dinner presented by restaurateur Great Performances. The literary program features authors reading from their works, followed by a discussion with the moderator, a Q&A with the audience, and book signing. Greenlight Bookstore at BAM kiosks will provide books for purchase.

Tickets for Eat, Drink & Be Literary go on sale December 10 to Friends of BAM and December 17 to the general public. Tickets can be purchased by calling BAM Ticket Services at 718.636.4100 or by visiting BAM.org. Tickets also may be purchased in person at the BAM Box Office, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Avenue from 10am to 6pm Monday—Friday; 12noon—6pm on Saturday; and 12noon—4pm on Sundays with scheduled performances.

Tickets are $55, which includes admission to the reading, dinner, wine, tax, and tip. Purchase tickets for five or more Eat, Drink & Be Literary events to save 20%.

The featured authors and moderators are:

January 23 Martin Amis, Author Deborah Treisman, Moderator

“Mr. Amis is his generation’s top literary dog...You’re never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In adolescence, everybody feels the impulse to write—poems, plays, stories. Writers are simply the people who stick with it…What we loosely call ‘inspiration’ remains as mysterious as that first adolescent impulse.” —Martin Amis

Martin Amis is the author of 13 novels, including Money, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, The Pregnant Widow, and, most recently, Lionel Asbo, State of England. He is the author of the memoir Experience, two collections of short stories, and six books of nonfiction, including The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions, Koba the Dread, and The War Against Cliché. Amis has served as literary editor of The New Statesman and is a regular contributor to many newspapers and journals including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. He lives in Brooklyn.

February 6 Colson Whitehead, Author Deborah Treisman, Moderator

“A satirist so playful that you often don’t even feel his scalpel, Whitehead toys with the shards of contemporary culture with an infectious glee.” —The Daily Beast

“You take what you want from a genre, deform it, steal from it, pay homage, and at the same time, if you’re doing it right, you are extending the possibilities of that genre, reinvigorating it.” —Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels John Henry Days, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize; Apex Hides the Hurt; the bestseller Sag Harbor, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and most recently, the post-apocalyptic zombie novel Zone One. He is also the author of the essay collection The Colossus of New York. Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and Granta. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting Award. He lives in Brooklyn.

February 27 Nell Freudenberger, Author Phillip Lopate, Moderator

“In simple, elegant prose, she renders foreign landscapes with unsentimental precision.” —Vogue

“Sometimes you find someone with whom you think you could stay for hundreds of pages, and that’s how a novel starts.” —Nell Freudenberger

Nell Freudenberger is the author of The Dissident, a novel about a Chinese performance artist in Los Angeles, and most recently, The Newlyweds, about a Bangladeshi Muslim woman whose online courtship leads to marriage in America. She is also the author of the short story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Freudenberger, a Guggenheim Fellow, was a recipient of a 2005 Whiting Award and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn.

March 6 Jamaica Kincaid, Author Phillip Lopate, Moderator

“Kincaid writes with passion and conviction…a musical sense of language, a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.” —The New York Times

“I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.” —Jamaica Kincaid

Born in Antigua, Jamaica Kincaid is the author of the memoir My Brother, which won the Prix Femina Etranger, and the works Annie John, Lucy, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, Mr. Potter, and The Autobiography of My Mother, which won the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Kincaid’s short story collection At the Bottom of the River won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she was a staff writer for 19 years. Her first novel in 10 years, See Now Then, on the topic of marriage and family life, publishes this February. She lives in Vermont.

April 3 Junot Díaz, Author Deborah Treisman, Moderator

“His world explodes off the page into the canon of our literature and our hearts.” —Walter Mosley

“The only success I’ve had as a writer is by screwing up over and over and over. This is a tiring and demoralizing way to go about writing. But I don’t know any other approach.” —Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic. He is the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; This is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, and numerous Best American Short Stories anthologies. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, a PEN/ Malamud Award, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a PEN/O. Henry Award, among other accolades. Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop. He lives in New York and Massachusetts.

May 8 Alison Bechdel, Author Phillip Lopate, Moderator

“As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs…The book delivers lightning bolts of revelation.” —The New York Times Book Review on Are You My Mother?

“Cartooning for me has been like a way to be a crypto-writer…I don’t want to diminish the drawing. I think it’s integral to what I do. But I’m kind of a secret writer.” —Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is the author of two bestselling graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which won an Eisner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Are You My Mother? For 25 years, she wrote and drew the popular comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life, queer and otherwise. Bechdel has also been an editor of the Best American Comics series and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Vermont.

May 29 Richard Russo, Author Harold Augenbraum, Moderator

“There is a big, wry heart beating at the center of Russo’s fiction” —The New Yorker

“For me, writing has nothing to do with telling people what I think and everything to do with discovering what I think.” —Richard Russo

Richard Russo is the author of six novels: Mohawk, Bridge of Sighs, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, That Old Cape Magic, and Empire Falls, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and which he adapted for the award-winning HBO miniseries starring Ed Harris. Russo has written screenplays for numerous films, including Ice Harvest and Keeping Mum, and penned the short story collection The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, the novella Intervention, and the memoir Elsewhere. He lives in Maine and Boston.

June 5 Keith Gessen and Masha Gessen, Authors Phillip Lopate, Moderator

“[Keith] Gessen…proves himself not only a capable observer but a natural novelist with a warm gun.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia” —The Wall Street Journal, on [Masha Gessen’s] The Man Without a Face

Keith Gessen is the editor-in-chief of n+1 and the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men. He has written for The New Yorker and the London Review of Books and is the editor and co- translator of Kirill Medvedev's It's No Good and co-translator of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. In 2008, Gessen was named one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for fiction. He lives in Brooklyn.

Masha Gessen is a journalist and the author of several books, including Perfect Rigor, Blood Matters, and most recently, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She has contributed to Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and numerous other publications, and was recently appointed director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service.

Moderators

Deborah Treisman Deborah Treisman is the fiction editor at The New Yorker. She hosts the award-winning monthly New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and is the editor of "20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker." She was the 2012 recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award for her contribution to fiction.

Phillip Lopate Phillip Lopate is the author of a dozen books, including the novel The Rug Merchant and the non- fiction works Waterfront, Portrait of My Body, Notes on Sontag, Getting Personal, and Being with Children, and a contributing author to BAM: The Complete Works. Lopate is a Guggenheim Fellow and the director of the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

Harold Augenbraum Harold Augenbraum is executive director of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He has published seven books on Latino literature of the United States. In 2012, the University of Texas Press published his co-translation of The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo, and in 2013, Penguin will publish his edition of The Collected Poems of Marcel Proust.

About the National Book Awards The mission of the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America. Please visit the National Book Awards website at nationalbook.org for more information.

About BAM BAM’s mission is to be the home for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas. America’s oldest performing arts institution, it is recognized internationally for innovative dance, music, and theater programming—including its renowned Next Wave Festival. BAM also features an acclaimed repertory film program, literary and visual art events, and extensive educational programs. The institution is led by President Karen Brooks Hopkins and Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo. www.BAM.org

For press information contact Sandy Sawotka at 718.636.4190 or [email protected].

Credits Bloomberg is the presenting sponsor for Eat, Drink & Be Literary

Support for Eat, Drink & Be Literary is generously provided by the Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Charitable Trust

Leadership support for Eat, Drink & Be Literary provided by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

Programming in the Lepercq Space is supported by The Lepercq Foundation

BAM Winter/Spring 2013 supporters: Bank of America; The Irene Diamond Fund; Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art; The Florence Gould Foundation; The Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mikhail Prokhorov Fund; Stavros Niarchos Foundation; The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc.; The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation; The SHS Foundation; The Shubert Foundation, Inc.; The Skirball Foundation; The Starr Foundation; Target; Time Warner Inc.; The Wall Street Journal; The Winston Foundation, Inc.

Pepsi is the official beverage of BAM. Sovereign Bank is the BAM Marquee sponsor. Yamaha is the official piano for BAM. R/GA is the BAM.org sponsor. New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge is the official hotel for BAM.

Your tax dollars make BAM programs possible through funding from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. The BAM facilities are owned by the City of New York and benefit from public funds provided through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs with support from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin; the New York City Council including Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, Finance Committee Chair Domenic M. Recchia Jr., Cultural Affairs Committee Chair Jimmy Van Bramer, the Brooklyn Delegation of the Council, and Councilwoman Letitia James; and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

BAM would like to thank the Brooklyn Delegations of the New York State Assembly, Joseph R. Lentol, Delegation Leader; and New York Senate, Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Delegation Leader.

General Information BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, BAM Rose Cinemas, and BAMcafé are located in the Peter Jay Sharp building at 30 Lafayette Avenue (between St Felix Street and Ashland Place) in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. BAM Harvey Theater is located two blocks from the main building at 651 Fulton Street (between Ashland and Rockwell Places). Both locations house Greenlight Bookstore at BAM kiosks. BAM Fisher, located at 321 Ashland Place, is the newest addition to the BAM campus and houses the Judith and Alan Fishman Space and Rita K. Hillman Studio. BAM Rose Cinemas is Brooklyn’s only movie house dedicated to first-run independent and foreign film and repertory programming. BAMcafé, operated by Great Performances, is open for dining prior to BAM Howard Gilman Opera House evening performances. BAMcafé also features an eclectic mix of spoken word and live music for BAMcafé Live on Friday and Saturday nights with a special BAMcafé Live menu available starting at 6pm.

Subway: 2, 3, 4, 5, Q, B to Atlantic Avenue – Barclays Center (2, 3, 4, 5 to Nevins St for Harvey Theater) D, N, R to Pacific Street; G to Fulton Street; C to Lafayette Avenue Train: Long Island Railroad to Atlantic Terminal – Barclays Center Bus: B25, B26, B41, B45, B52, B63, B67 all stop within three blocks of BAM Car: Commercial parking lots are located adjacent to BAM

For ticket and BAMbus information, call BAM Ticket Services at 718.636.4100, or visit BAM.org.

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