The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  David Ebershoff (’91) is the author of three novels, The Danish Girl, Pasadena, and The Nineteenth Wife, as well as a story collection, The Rose City. He is an executive editor at Random House and teaches graduate writing at Columbia University. He lives in New York.

  Jeffrey Eugenides (’82) is the author of three novels, The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex (which was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), and The Marriage Plot.

  Richard Foreman (’59) has directed and designed and often written over seventy plays at major theaters here and abroad. Eight collections of his plays have been published, plus book-length studies of his work in the USA, Germany, and Japan. His awards include a MacArthur “Genius” grant, a PEN Master American Dramatist Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature, and he is an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.

  Amity Gaige (’95) is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder, which was published by Twelve Books/Hachette in 2013. Named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times, among other publications, Schroder has been translated into fourteen languages. Her short stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. She lives in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the current Visiting Writer at Amherst College.

  Robin Green (’67) is a TV writer-producer who lives in New York City with her husband/writing partner, Mitchell Burgess, amidst shelves full of industry awards for their work on Northern Exposure and The Sopranos, among other shows. She likes to think that John Hawkes would have enjoyed some of it. If he even had a television . . .

  Andrew Sean Greer (’92, ’95 MFA) is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, most recently The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. He has been an NEA and New York Public Library Cullman Fellow and received a PEN/O’Henry Prize, a California Book Award, a Northern California Book Award, and a New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He lives in San Francisco.

  Christina Haag (’82) is an actress and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Come to the Edge. Winner of the Ella Dickey Literacy Award, she has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and Hamptons magazine. She received the Dramalogue Award for Outstanding Actress and continues to work in film, theater, and television. A graduate of Juilliard, she lives in New York City and is currently working on a novel.

  Joan Hilty (’89) is the creator of the long-running comic strip Bitter Girl; her artwork has also appeared in the Village Voice, the Advocate, and Ms. magazine. As a senior editor at DC Comics, she acquired numerous award-winning graphic novels. She currently develops and packages books as editor in chief of PageTurner Graphic Novels and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “The Times” is dedicated to Stephen Gendin ’89. Special thanks to Louise Sloan ’88, Rebecca Hensler ’91, and Angela Taylor ’88.

  A. J. Jacobs (’90) is the editor at large for Esquire magazine, an NPR contributor, and the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including The Year of Living Biblically, The Know-It-All, and Drop Dead Healthy. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. He asks that you pardon his French.

  Sean Kelly (’84) has produced thousands of humorous images on politics, business, and entertainment for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Businessweek, Rolling Stone, and the Atlantic, among other publications. His visual commentaries have appeared frequently on the op-ed page of the New York Times and he has won top awards from the Society of Illustrators and the National Cartoonists Society.

  David Klinghoffer (’87) is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle. His most recent book, a collaboration with Senator Joe Lieberman, is The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath. His other books include Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History, The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, and the spiritual memoir The Lord Will Gather Me In. A former literary editor of National Review magazine, Klinghoffer lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and children.

  Jincy Willett Kornhauser (’78, ’81 AM), the widow of Professor Edward Kornhauser, is the author of short stories and novels, including Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, The Writing Class, and Amy Falls Down, all published by St. Martin’s Press.

  Marie Myung-Ok Lee (’86), author of Somebody’s Daughter, has a new novel due out from Simon & Schuster in 2015. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Guardian, the Nation, the Atlantic, and Salon. She was the first recipient of a creative writing Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea and has won the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship and the Richard Margolis Award for social justice reporting. She has taught at Yale and Brown and currently teaches at Columbia University, where she is the Our Word Writer-in-Residence.

  David Levithan (’94) is the author of Boy Meets Boy, The Lover’s Dictionary, Every Day, Two Boys Kissing, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn), and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (written with John Green). At Brown, he was an editor of the College Hill Independent. He is now a publisher and editorial director at Scholastic, where he started as an intern between his sophomore and junior years of college, thanks to a listing in the Brown career library.

  Mara Liasson (’77) is the national political correspondent for National Public Radio. She is also a contributor to the Fox News programs Fox News Sunday and Special Report. Before coming to Washington in 1985 to work for NPR she was a radio and television reporter in San Francisco and a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two children.

  Lois Lowry (’58) is a mother and grandmother. She has been a journalist and photographer and is currently a writer of fiction, primarily for young people. Of her forty-three published books, two have received the Newbery Medal, awarded each year for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. She lives in Maine.

  Ira C. Magaziner (’69) is vice chairman and CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and chairman of the Clinton Clean Energy Initiative, both of which he cofounded with former US president Bill Clinton. From 1993 through 1998, he served as senior advisor to President Clinton for policy development at the White House. Prior to his White House appointment, he built two successful international consulting firms, advising governments on economic development and corporations on business strategy. Mr. Magaziner graduated from Brown University as valedictorian in 1969 and attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar.

  Madeline Miller (’00, ’01 AM) concentrated in Classics at Brown University. She also studied in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama. For the past decade she has taught Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students. The Song of Achilles, her first novel, won the 2012 Orange Prize and was a New York Times bestseller. Her essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, and NPR.org. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches and writes.

  Christine Montross (’06 MD, ’07 MMS) is the author of Falling into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis and Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab. She is an assistant professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University and also a practicing inpatient psychiatrist. She received her undergraduate degrees and a master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Michigan.

  Rick Moody (’83) is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, a memoir, and a collection of essays, On Celestial Music. He is a music critic at The Rumpus, and he teaches at NYU and Yale.

  Jonathan Mooney (’00) is a dyslexic writer and activist who did not learn to read until he was twelve years old. He holds an honors degree in English literature from Brown and is the author of The Short Bus and Learning Outside the Lines. Jonathan is founder and president of Project Eye-To-Eye, a mentoring and advocacy nonprofit or
ganization for students with learning differences. Project Eye-To-Eye currently has twenty chapters in thirteen states, working with over three thousand students, parents, and educators nationwide.

  Rowan Ricardo Phillips (’98 AM, ’03 PhD) is the author of The Ground and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and has translated Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth from Catalan to English. He is a recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Whiting Award, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image Award. He is a regular contributor to the Paris Review and a writer for Artforum. He teaches at Stony Brook University.

  Dawn Raffel (’79) is the author of four books, most recently The Secret Life of Objects.

  Bill Reynolds (’68), a former Brown basketball cocaptain and All-Ivy player, is a longtime sports columnist at the Providence Journal. He’s also the author of nine books and coauthor of three more, three of which have been on bestseller lists. One became the background for the award-winning ESPN movie Unguarded.

  Marilynne Robinson (’66) is the author of Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award), Home (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize for fiction), and the modern classic Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Her nonfiction books include Mother Country, The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, and When I Was a Child I Read Books. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  Sarah Ruhl (’97, ’01 MFA) is a playwright whose plays have been produced worldwide. Her works include Stage Kiss; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Passion Play, a cycle; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Dear Elizabeth; and Late: a cowboy song. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she also received the Whiting Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a PEN Center award. She received her MFA at Brown, where she studied under Paula Vogel. She lives in Brooklyn.

  Ariel Sabar (’93) is an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Harper’s. His debut book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. His second book, Heart of the City, was called a “beguiling romp” (New York Times) and an “engaging, moving and lively read” (Toronto Star). Visit his website at www.arielsabar.com.

  Joanna Scott (’85 AM) is the author of eleven works of fiction, including the novels Follow Me, Tourmaline, Arrogance, and De Potter’s Grand Tour. Her essays and stories have appeared in the Nation, the New York Times, Conjunctions, Black Clock, the Paris Review, and other journals. She is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

  Jeff Shesol (’91), a Rhodes scholar (Oxford University ’93), created the comic strip Thatch for the Brown Daily Herald. It was nationally syndicated from 1994 to 1998, appearing daily in more than 150 newspapers. Jeff was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and is a founding partner of West Wing Writers. He is also the author of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court and Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade. Jeff and his wife, Rebecca Epstein ’92, live in Washington, DC, with their two children.

  David Shields (’78) is the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, Salinger, co-written with Shane Salerno. Reality Hunger was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead was a New York Times bestseller, and Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Shields’s work has been translated into twenty languages.

  Krista Tippett (’83) is the Peabody Award–winning creator, executive producer, and host of public radio’s On Being. She was the New York Times stringer in divided Berlin and special assistant to the US ambassador to West Germany. She has an MDiv from Yale University. She is the author of Speaking of Faith and the New York Times bestseller Einstein’s God.

  Alfred Uhry (’58) is one of very few writers to receive an Academy Award, Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize, all for dramatic writing. His plays and musicals include The Robber Bridegroom (a musical based on Eudora Welty’s story), The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Parade, and Driving Miss Daisy (play and screenplay). His additional screenplays include Mystic Pizza and Rich in Love. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

  Afaa Michael Weaver (Michael S. Weaver, ’87 AM) is the author of The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press), his twelfth collection of poetry. He is also a playwright. In 1987, his full-length play Rosa was his graduate thesis in Brown’s creative writing program. The recipient of Pew and NEA fellowships, as well as a Fulbright, he also has two Pushcart Prizes. He holds the Alumnae Chair at Simmons College.

  Meg Wolitzer (’81) is the author of novels including The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. In the fall of 2013, along with singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Meg Wolitzer was a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier program at Princeton University.

  Permissions

  “In Brunensis Speramus” copyright © 2014 by Sean Kelly; “Sun Under Cloud Cover” copyright © 2014 by Jeffrey Eugenides; “Train Rides” copyright © 2014 by Lois Lowry; “Invisible Histories” copyright © 2014 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips; “Bartleby at Brown” copyright © 2014 by Jincy Willett Kornhauser; “Indirection” copyright © 2014 by Donald Antrim; “Bending the Letter” copyright © 2014 by Brian Christian; “A Campus Tour: My Life in Poetry at Brown” copyright © 2014 by Nicole Cooley; “The Day President John F. Kennedy Died” copyright © 2013 by Susan Cheever (this essay first appeared as “The Day a President Died” in the Brown Alumni Magazine, November/December 2013); “You” copyright © 2014 by Amity Gaige; “BDH Editor Soars, Stumbles, Snags a Wife” copyright © 2014 by M. Charles Bakst; “Number One Tofu Scramble with Johnny Toast” copyright © 2014 by Robert Arellano; “That October” is an excerpt from Come to the Edge: A Memoir by Christina Haag, copyright © 2011 by Christina Haag. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.; “How Brown’s Food Changed My Life” copyright © 2014 by Dana Cowin; “The Net” copyright © 2014 by David Levithan; “Love is a long, close scrutiny” is an excerpt from How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields, copyright © 2013 by David Shields. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, and Notting Hill Editions in the UK. All rights reserved.; “Higher Learning” copyright © 2014 by Marilynne Robinson; “Syllabus (Annotated)” copyright © 2014 by Rick Moody is an adaptation of “Syllabus (For Robert Coover)” by Rick Moody, which first appeared in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2012, Vol. 32; “My Own Core Curriculum” copyright © 2014 by Marie Myung-Ok Lee; “Your Dinner with Susan Sontag” copyright © 2014 by Joanna Scott; “The Place of Lucky Accidents” copyright © 2014 by Dawn Raffel; “A Doctor Poet?” copyright © 2014 by Christine Montross; “Cursing My Way to Enlightenment” copyright © 2014 by A. J. Jacobs; “The Entropy and the Ecstasy” copyright © 2014 by Mary Caponegro; “What Are You, Anyway?” copyright © 2014 by Amy DuBois Barnett; “Mix Tape” copyright © 2014 by Andrew Sean Greer; “The Wheel of the Fuji Goes Round” copyright © 2014 by Dilip D’Souza; “How Brown Turned Me into a Right-Wing Religious Conservative” copyright © 2008 by David Klinghoffer (this essay first appeared in the Brown Alumni Magazine, January/February 2008); “Townie” copyright © 2014 by Robin Green; “The Dyslexic Brain Kicks Ass” copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Mooney; “Neat-Hairs” copyright © 2014 by Ariel Sabar; “Beautiful Girls” copyright © 2014 by Kate Bornstein; “Sleepwalking at Brown” copyright © 2014 by
Meg Wolitzer; “Help Me Help You (Help Me)” copyright © 2014 by Lisa Birnbach; “Jump Shots” copyright © 2014 by Bill Reynolds; “Faith and Doubt at Brown” copyright © 2014 by Krista Tippett; “Did I Really Found Production Workshop?” copyright © 2014 by Richard Foreman; “Residential Life” copyright © 2014 by David Ebershoff; “Escape from the Planet of the Apps” copyright © 2014 by Jeff Shesol; “Talking ’Bout My Generation” copyright © 2014 by Ira C. Magaziner; “Creating Change: Black at Brown in the 1960s” copyright © 2014 by Spencer R. Crew; “Need-Blind Now!” copyright © 2014 by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum; “The Times” copyright © 2014 by Joan Hilty; “To Be Young, Indignant, and Inspired” copyright © 2014 by Pamela Constable; “And Yet Again Wonderful” copyright © 2014 by Alfred Uhry; “My Honorary Degree and the Factory Forewoman” copyright © 2014 by Edwidge Danticat; “Is playwriting teachable? (the example of Paula Vogel)” copyright © 2013 by Sarah Ruhl; “How I Became a Freelance Writer at Brown” copyright © 2014 by Mara Liasson; “In Troy There Lies the Scene” copyright © 2014 by Madeline Miller; “Giant Steps” copyright © 2014 by Afaa Michael Weaver.

  About the Editor

  Judy Sternlight (’82) enjoyed a long career in theater and communications, which included teaching and performing improvisational theater with Some Assembly Required in New York City. Passionate about storytelling, she then spent nearly a decade editing books at Random House, Ballantine, and Modern Library before founding Judy Sternlight Literary Services and cofounding 5E, the independent editors’ group. She has worked with many acclaimed authors and translators, including Marie-Helene Bertino, Rita Mae Brown, Edith Grossman, Bret Anthony Johnston, Mark Kurlansky, Peter Matthiessen, Daniel Menaker, and Patricia T. O’Conner.