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As we prime our book club model for post-COVID growth, we are programming a couple of longer late-summer episodes about our own books via Hat & Beard Press. To support Big Table or Hat & Beard, join our book clubs. You can find out more about them at hatandbeard.com. Your support fuels our books, podcasts, exhibitions, and events, and we thank you. On today’s episode of Big Table, we've recorded a long-form conversation between our own Mandy Kahn and Dana Gioia, both accomplished poets. Masters of traditional lyrical forms and natives of Los Angeles, they are both also currently out with new books: Holy Doors, Mandy’s third collection, is one of the first titles on our Hat & Beard Editions imprint. Meanwhile, Mr. Gioia has published, collected, or translated dozens of books throughout his storied career, which includes a stint as the director of the NEA and poet laureate of California. His most recent collection is Meet Me at the Lighthouse (Graywolf Press, 2023). Both are available now. This episode is more free form, with both poets reading from their work in dialogue with one another as they discuss their craft. Please enjoy Mandy Kahn in conversation with Dana Gioia discussing their new books and a whole lot more.

File Under: Slime by Christopher Michlig — a cultural history of Slime — was recently published by Hat & Beard Editions. What is slime? We are well acquainted with its qualities in conjunction with certain things from which we tend to recoil but to which we are also at times attracted. Despite being everywhere, slime is a surprisingly unexamined cultural phenomenon. File Under: Slime collates a cultural history of “slime” and “sliminess,” with particular emphasis on precedents in pop-culture, contemporary art, ecology, science fiction, literature, critical theory, and cinema. Artist and professor Christopher Michlig’s research characterizes slime as a pervasive, oozing, cultural phenomenon, documenting instances of its evolving representations. The appearance of slime in such films as The Blob, Ghostbusters, and Poltergeist are diligently and humorously analyzed, commercial and graphic design precedents are incorporated, and the work of such artists as Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman, Robert Smithson, Sterling Ruby, and Jason Rhoades are discussed. Alongside a multitude of visual references, File Under: Slime is supplemented with literary and theoretical references from such writers as Jean Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Mike Kelley, Rosalind Krauss, Laura Mulvey, and others. +++ SLIME: A NATURAL HISTORY by SUSANNE WEDLICH — a different but like-minded cultural history of slime — was also recently published by Melville House in New York. This groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out. Slime exists at the interfaces of all things: between the organs and layers in our bodies, and between the earth, water, and air in the world, and is often produced in the fatal encounter between predator and prey. In this fascinating, ground-breaking book, Wedlich leads us on a scientific journey through the 3-billion-year history of slime—from the part it played in the evolution of life on this planet to the way it might feature in the post-human future. She also explores the cultural and emotional significance of slime, from its starring role in the horror genre to its subtle influence on Art Nouveau. +++ Susanne Wedlich studied biology and political science in Munich and has worked as a writer in Boston and Singapore. She is currently a freelance science journalist for Der Spiegel and National Geographic. She lives in Munich. Christopher Michlig, meanwhile, makes work in a wide range of media, including collage, printmaking, sculpture, and film. His work has been reviewed and featured in The Los Angeles Times, Mousse Magazine, Saatchi Online, Flavorpill, and New City and exhibited nationally and internationally.  Michlig received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California and he is currently Associate Professor and area Coordinator of Core Studio at the University of Oregon, Eugene. The authors caught up this spring to discuss their books and mutual fascination with slime.

For Big Table episode 51, editors Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker discuss their latest book, Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter.  Is there a “Rosebud” object in your past? A long-vanished thing that lingers in your memory—whether you want it to or not? As much as we may treasure the stuff we own, perhaps just as significant are the objects we have, in one way or another, lost. What is it about these bygone objects? Why do they continue to haunt us long after they’ve vanished from our lives? In Lost Objects, editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker have gathered answers to those questions in the form of 50 true stories from a dazzling roster of writers, artists, thinkers, and storytellers, including Lucy Sante, Ben Katchor, Lydia Millet, Neil LaBute, Laura Lippman, Geoff Manaugh, Paola Antonelli, and Margaret Wertheim to name just a few. Each spins a unique narrative that tells a personal tale, and dives into the meaning of objects that remain present to us emotionally, even after they have physically disappeared. While we may never recover this Rosebud, Lost Objects will teach us something new about why it mattered in the first place—and matters still. For the readings this episode, two authors read their essays from the book: First up, Lucy Sante discusses her long lost club chair; and Mandy Keifez recounts her lost Orgone Accumulator. Music by Languis

We are on episode 50! Thank you all for listening along over the last couple of years. This one is special as it features a book published by Hat & Beard Press, one of Big Table’s main partners in cultural pursuits. dublab: Future Roots Radio is the long-awaited book telling the story of the pioneering online radio station through interviews, photos, art, and more. The dublab universe springs to life from these pages, unveiling the ethos that has guided the storied station since 1999. We celebrated the release of the book with a live event at Neuehouse in downtown Los Angeles this past winter. The evening featured a panel moderated by DJ Mamabear with dublab DJs Rachel Day, Hoseh, Frosty, and Langosta. dublab: Future Roots Radio, out now on Hat & Beard Press, is an ode to the boundless power of creative music and community building in Los Angeles and beyond. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation recorded at NeueHouse earlier this year.

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An Essay with Digressions by Tim Carpenter is a book-length essay about photography’s unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. It’s also a book about photography theory, literary criticism, art history, and philosophy. Drawing on writings and poems by Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Valery, Virginia Wolff, and other artists, musicians, and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter argues passionately―in one main essay and a series of lively digressions―that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one’s sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality. Printed in three colors that reflect the various “voices” of the book, the text design, provided by publisher and editor Mike Slack, follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading. To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die is a unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, and is as enthralling as other genre-melding photography books, The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer, Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, and more recently, Stephen Shore’s book Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, among others. Carpenter’s research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera. Tim and JC caught up recently to discuss this fascinating book, now in its second printing.

After 100 books on design, Steven Heller has given us a coming-of-age memoir. The award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times has included 100 color photographs in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York, a 224-page visually inspired tour of the center of New York City’s 1960s and ’70s youth culture. Steven Heller's memoir is not simply a chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but rather a tale of growing up, whereby with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ’70s in New York City. Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 depicts his ambitious journey from the very beginning of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his path as he moves from stints at the New York Review of Sex, to Screw, and the New York Free Press, on to the East Village Other, Grove Press, and Interview until becoming the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at the of age 23. Having followed his work for years, JC Gabel was glad to sit down and talk with him about his start.

It is fitting that Bruce Adams’s new book, the sardonically-titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill off Irving Park Road in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side: It was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for this new band, The Smashing Pumpkins, who were regular customers of Bill Choi’s Korean-inspired restaurant, when they were first starting out. But let’s back up a few years, to set the scene of what was to come. After attending college at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in the mid-1980s, Adams worked at a record shop and wrote for the fanzine Your Flesh. He caught the indie rock bug, as it were, inspired by the then burgeoning independent music industry that had grown out of labels like Dischord in Washington, DC, Sub Pop in Seattle, and Touch & Go in Chicago, who presented a more artist-friendly path for bands to make a living selling records, CDs and cassettes Adams found his way to Chicago, where, by the mid-1990s, there was a golden age of independent businesses thriving in unison: records labels (Drag City, Thrill Jockey, Atavistic, Bloodshot, Carrot Top), distributors (Ajax, Cargo, Southern), records shops (Reckless, Dusty Groove, Wax Trax, The Quaker Goes Deaf), underground press (the Chicago Reader and New City, but also Lumpen and Stop Smiling), and venues (Cabaret Metro, Lounge Ax, the Empty Bottle, and Double Door). As Adams documents, it was a near-perfect eco-system for creativity and experimentation in a pre-digital age. You’re with Stupid is both a cultural history of the Chicago music world at that time, as told through the record labels and distributors that Adams worked for but also a how-to roadmap to founding a DIY operation. This is my conversation with Bruce Adams about his book and those times.

Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick’s best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, among many others. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West 67th Street were in conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history. Pinckney’s education in Hardwick’s orbit took place amidst the cultural movements then sweeping New York. In addition, through his peers and former classmates—Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin—Pinckney witnessed the coming together of the New Wave scene in the East Village. He experienced the avant-garde life while discovering the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation. It was his time for hope. In Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan (FSG, 2022), Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and to the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth Hardwick was not only his link to the intellectual heart of New York but also a source of continuous support and of inspiration—in the way she worked, her artistry, and in the beauty of her voice. Through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney as a writer himself. J.C. Gabel talked with Pinckney last fall to discuss his literary beginnings and the influence of Elizabeth Hardwick and her circle on his life and work. 

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works celebrating the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. In this unconventional, illuminated biography, Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle’s visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings—many previously unpublished or long unavailable–that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23. Along with her celebrated large-scale projects―including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem, and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany―Saint Phalle also produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with family, marriage to novelist Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with artist Jean Tinguely, and her productive years in Southern California. Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature, and comics has been published in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise. In the interviewer’s chair this episode is writer and curator Yann Perreau, who organized some exhibitions of works by Saint Phalle. Originally from Paris, Yann now lives in Los Angeles. Here’s Yann Perreau discussing the life and work of Saint Phalle with writer, critic, and biographer Nicole Rudick.

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”, or the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As the first woman to inherit those secrets, Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to them, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that resulted in amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before. Decades ago, her mother had suffered a fall that left her with amnesia too. When she recovered, she had gained access to the secrets. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, as well as resurrected Colombian history and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the seemingly incomprehensible. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the healing power of storytelling and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream. For Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to his memories—all that was left of one of his closest friends—Hua turned to writing. Stay True (Doubleday, 2022) is the book he’s been working on ever since—for over 20 years by Hua’s estimation. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. It is also a book about friendship, race, grieving and recovery. I first came to know Hua’s work through his music writing—first in the hip-hop column he wrote for The Wire, the British experimental music magazine, and more recently, in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Hua teaches at Bard College, and lives in Brooklyn. He grew up in the Bay Area, where most of the book takes place while he is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Hua and I have known each other loosely for many years—we have many mutual friends and are roughly the same age. I’ve always admired his work, and his beautifully written second book is a highpoint, jam-packed as it is with descriptive detail, a light and easy spare prose, and a meaningful account of an unlikely friendship.

Nick Drnaso, acclaimed author of Sabrina, is back with Acting Class, his third book on Drawn & Quarterly. A tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation, Acting Class brings together 10 strangers under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: They are all out of step with their surroundings and desperate for a change. With mounting unease, the class sinks deeper into Smith’s lessons, even as he demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group’s fears and desires are laid bare. Exploring the tension between who we are and how we present, Drnaso cracks open his characters’ masks and takes us through an unsettling American journey. Like Sabrina—the first graphic novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize—Drnaso’s latest offering is an extremely sharp study of our everyday existence and how we live. His minimalist comic-drawing style is nevertheless awash in a cinematic haze of melancholy and the color palette is hued in a realism that is uniquely his. A friend handed me Sabrina, several years ago, knowing I was somewhat of an outsider in the realm of underground comic culture, telling me, “You will love the book in the same way you love certain novels.” And he was right. While Drnaso is revered all over the world for his bleak honestness and sly, dark humor, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Although we are of different generations, the subtlety of his style is familiar to me as a fellow Midwesterner and Chicagoan. Notably, this is Big Table’s first episode centered around a graphic novel. It’s certainly a change from our focus on nonfiction books, but Drnaso’s storytelling pulls so effortlessly from real life that one feels his characters are meta comics versions of people encountered in our everyday lives.