A Double Book Event

Steve Wasserman and I go back. In 1971 he was a student in the American Studies honors seminar I was teaching, or faking, at Berkeley. In 1979, when he was an Op Ed editor at the Los Angeles Times, he asked me to write a premature obituary for John Wayne, which, as it happens, was the right time for me and for the story. I was lucky to write for him when he made the Los Angeles Times Book Review the best literary publication in the country. As an editor at Yale University Press, he solicited and helped edit the books that turned into The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 10 Songs and Under the Red White and Blue. We have always been friends.

As per the announcement below, on September 12, we’ll be sitting down together to talk about his new Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if it’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays—especially his early, still revelatory piece on the falsities of the Russian avant-garde of the early Soviet era—and my new What Nails It in the Yale ‘Why I Write’ series. We will talk about our own books and each other’s and everything we might elicit from everyone there.

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