Big Table

The Interview: 
 

Like many readers in the States, I first became aware of Norman Ohler’s work after reading Blitzed (2015), his epic history of drug use in the Third Reich. 

The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Ohler’s follow up—which came out in paperback in the States last year—was born from some of the research he was doing for Blitzed. The book is a page-turning historical thriller I couldn’t put down. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in WWII history and specifically subterfuge.

Ohler, who lives in Berlin, and I spoke last year while he was vacationing with his family on the island of Jersey.

We started in on how he discovered the untold story of Harro and Libertas, two free-love provocateurs who ran an underground circuit of anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns, as well as formal espionage activities, from the heart of Berlin during the height of the Third Reich’s power, and how their love story and largely unknown work to fight against fascism in their home country need to be better-known to the world.

The Reading: 

Scholar and author Jeffrey H. Jackson reads from his kindred spirit WWII resistance book, Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books), which follows the lives of two French women artists and lovers on the island of Jersey who defied the Nazis much the way Harro and Libertas did in Berlin.

Music composed by Kurt Weill

Performed by Westchester Symphony Orchestra & conducted by Siegfried Landau

The Interview:

Musician Warren Ellis’ first book, Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber & Faber, 2021), is a magical journal mixing memoir, cultural history, reportage, and travelogue. The memorable title comes from the Meltdown Festival, a concert series his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, curated in London in 1999 that featured a rare live performance by Nina Simone herself.

After her set, Ellis rushed the stage—not for a coveted set list, but for a piece of chewing gum Simone had discarded atop her piano, which he then preserved in a rolled-up hand towel. Ellis’ memento lived in a crumpled Tower Records bag for the next 20 years.

Two decades later, when Cave curated “Stranger than Kindness,” an exhibition at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, he included Simone’s gum as a piece of sculpture cast in silver. Cave called it a “religious artifact.”

In Nina Simone’s Gum, Ellis brings you along as he tracks the artifact for posterity. The book is a meditation on life, musicianship, and the importance of bestowing meaning to objects and experiences; it is also a tome about friendship, the artistic process, and human connection. 

To mix things up—and because Ellis was on tour—Dermot McPartland, our man in London, took over interviewing duties.

The Reading:

For the reading this episode, Warren Ellis reads from Nina Simone’s Gum, his latest book.

Music by Dirty Three

The Interview:

For over 50 years, Joan Didion, a daughter of California, has been in a league all her own, as a writer and novelist. Unlike many critics, she is capable of writing memorable fiction that, although not as widely read as her reportage and singular essays, stands the test of time. 

The Library of America Series recently published their second Joan Didion volume featuring the novels Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, as well as nonfiction works like Salvador, Miami and After Henry, her third major essay collection. 

Edited by former LA Times book editor, author, and critic David Ulin, the collection is brimming with her enduring legacy and highlights her works from the 1980s and 1990s, which are not as well known. 

In this episode, Ulin helps us unpack why Didion’s later work and overall influence cannot be underestimated among several younger generations of novelists and essayists. 

The Reading:

For the reading this episode, journalist and author Steffie Nelson reads the piece “A Trip to Xanadu” from the recently published collection of odds and ends by Didion, entitled Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Knopf). Nelson is the author of Slouching Toward Los Angeles (Rare Bird Books), a collection of essays about Didion and the City of Angels.

Music by Yusef Lateef

The Interview:

Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a talent agent and screenwriter. One of his childhood heroes was the doomed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930s to eke out a living as a screenwriter while he labored on what ended up being his fourth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. A few months shy of his 40th birthday, Specktor moved back to L.A. and into a crumbling building across the street from where Fitzgerald lived out his last years. Flailing professionally and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, he became "unmoored." Instead of cracking up, as Fitz had after the Roaring Twenties ended and he struggled to complete his post-Gatsby masterpiece Tender is the Night, Specktor embarked on a journey of self-discovery, re-evaluating ideas of success and failure in general but especially in Los Angeles, his home town. 

What followed is part cultural memoir, part cultural history, and part portrait of a place, as the dust jacket declares in Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California (Tin House Books, 2021). Specktor tells his own narrative alongside some known and lesser-known players of the New Hollywood era of his youth: you meet Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, and Michael Cimino. 

The result is a masterwork of genre-bending nonfiction, an unvarnished view of Tinseltown and its demons, but also its undeniable magic and charm. In the end, after much loss, optimism wins. And that is when you know you have a good book on your hands: When it helps us navigate through the "beautiful ruins that await us all." 

J.C. Gabel spoke with Skecktor, earlier this fall, about his latest book and the creative process. 

The Reading: Matthew Specktor reads from his latest book, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California.

Music by David Bowie.

The Interview: 

Kyle Beachy has been skateboarding for as long as he’s been creating stories. For him, the two have always been intertwined. After releasing the coming-of-age novel The Slide in 2009, he began to write more seriously about skateboarding, as aficionado, critic, and essayist. A decade’s worth of this material is now included in The Most Fun Thing (Grand Central Publishing), his second, book-length collection. The Most Fun Thing delves deep into skateboarding's origins and ethos. What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of 40, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion hatched in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths.

Beachy is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he has taught for more than a decade. He sat down with J.C. Gabel earlier this fall to discuss the new book, nonfiction vs. fiction writing, and how exactly skateboarding has shaped his life. 

The Reading: 

Kyle Beachy reads from his latest collection, The Most Fun Thing. 

Music by Hieroglyphics

The Interview:

With the world leaders of the G20 having met about climate change last week and the upcoming United Nations climate summit happening in Scotland this week, we’re airing our conversation from a few months back with journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, who began to more steadily research and write about the environment after moving with his wife to New Orleans a few years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His sprawling cover story for The New York Times Magazine, “Losing Earth,” told about how American scientists had figured out the solutions to what is now the climate crisis in the late 1970s. The Reagan Revolution in 1980, however, and America's swing to the right, led to a suppression of sober conversations aimed at reducing fossil fuel use or human-driven environmental harm. Deregulation and rampant lobbying and corruption by the energy companies have plagued us for four decades since. Nothing was done then, and nothing has really been done since, as Greta Thunberg noted the other day in her blah-blah-blah, all-talk-and-no-action commentary after the G20 summit, highlighting the inability of our world leaders to act in meaningful ways—or act at all!

Rich's most recent book, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade (MCD/FSG), recollects and reworks for book publication, a large part of his journalism from the past decade. Rich has also published three novels (including one about climate change, Odds Against Tomorrow), and has a natural ear for dialogue. His research and writing chops are put to good use in this first nonfiction collection, covering everything from DuPont poisoning waterways (one of the stories in the book became the Todd Haynes film Dark Water) to kamikaze starfish to late-20th Century glow-in-the-dark rabbit experiments. Second Nature is essential reading for anyone who cares about the ecology (and the future) of the earth. 

The Reading:

Nathaniel Rich reads from his latest collection, Second Nature (MCD/FSG) 

Music by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental

The Interview: 

Peter Mendelsund began his career as a concert pianist, and reinvented himself as a graphic designer, now creative director, almost by accident. He came to book design—first as a reader, then as an independent bookstore employee, and ultimately, as a book cover designer, which he practiced full time at PenguinRandom House. He is presently the Creative Director of The Atlantic, and in his spare time, he writes novels, the second of which, The Delivery, is currently out on hardcover from FSG. 

For The Interview in this episode, J.C. Gabel talks with Mendelsund about his last nonfiction book, The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers & Art at the Edges of Literature, published by Ten Speed Press, which he co-authored with literary scholar David Alworth. What began as a Harvard lecture has become a gorgeous coffee table book examining the artwork of book cover design through the modern age; it is an overview of trends, insights, and back stories, many told through other voices from the literary and design worlds. It is also an invaluable tool for anyone interested in book jacket design and its rich and colorful history. 

The Reading: 

Peter Mendelsund reads from his latest novel, The Delivery (FSG) 

Music by Laurie Spiegel

The Interview:

On this episode of Big Table, artist and photographer Jona Frank talks with J.C. Gabel about her visual memoir, Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (Monacelli Press), which documents, in elaborately staged sets, her troubled childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey. Frank’s mother suffered from mental illness, as did her brother, who was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the photographs, three different actors portray Frank at various stages of her adolescence, with actress Laura Dern cast as her mother. Frank’s writing, produced in vignettes, augments the original photography in Cherry Hill, a beautifully packaged book designed by Alex Kalman. As Arthur Lebow pointed out earlier this year in a New York Times feature about Frank's latest book, Jona Frank has “recreated non-Kodak moments, the kind that were hidden rather than commemorated.”

The Reading:

Jona Frank reads from her new visual memoir, Cherry Hill. 

Music by Raymond Guiot

The Interview:

On this episode of Big Table, J.C. Gabel talks with We Transfer co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Damian Bradfield about his first book The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet (Penguin Press), which imagines and outlines a path toward a better internet experience than exists today. Bradfield knows that most of the big data being compiled online is misused and deceptively collected using legalese, “accept terms,” and disclaimers that no one reads. The Trust Manifesto unpacks what many of us users assume is going on behind the scenes of surveillance capitalism. Bradfield is right: To regain some credibility in an age of tech monopoly normalcy, the industry needs to build a bridge of trust with its users again. Not a month goes by without another revelation by a former employee of one of these tech behemoths, exposing profit-over-safety, profit-over-common-sense, and (of late) profit-over-democracy itself. The Trust Manifesto is a wake-up call, and a road map to a better internet, and, one hopes, a better post-digital-age future.

The Reading: 

Technology writer and critic, Joanne McNeil reads from her debut Lurking: How a Person Became a User (MCD/FSG Books), a concise but wide-ranging history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of view of the user.

Music by Vangelis

The Interview: 

In Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (The University of Chicago Press), William Sites brings the cosmic musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961, he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. 

On this episode, William Sites, the Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, talks with J.C. Gabel about the mid-century history of Chicago’s South Side via the visionary Sun Ra. 

The Reading:

Musician, artist and poet Damon Locks reads from Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City.

Music by Sun Ra and His Arkestra