Guest host Jane Curtin presents two stories from the influential literary journal Ploughshares. “y = mx+b,” by Andrew Altschul uses an algebraic formula to explore the act of storytelling and the shape of life itself. It’s performed by Peter Mark Kendall. In our second story, Jamel Brinkley’s “I Happy Am,” a boy who usually imagines himself as a robot begins to imagine his own, real life. It also reflects on the way issues of race and class can affect a child’s imagination. The reader is Karen Pittman. With commentary from Claire Messud and James Wood the hosts of the live show.
Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels The Gringa, Deus Ex Machina, and Lady Lazarus. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he was the founding books editor at The Rumpus and is a Contributing Editor at Zyzzyva. He teaches at Colorado State University.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize; and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and American Short Fiction, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. Brinkley was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has been awarded a 2021 O. Henry Prize. He teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Jane Curtin has appeared on Broadway in Noises Off, Candida, and Our Town. Her off-Broadway work includes Love Letters and the musical revue Pretzels, which she co-wrote. She starred in the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun and won back-to-back Emmy Awards for her role on Kate & Allie. She is an original cast member of Saturday Night Live and also starred in the television film series The Librarian and its spin-off, The Librarians. Her film credits include Coneheads; Antz; I Love You, Man; I Don’t Know How She Does It; The Heat; The Spy Who Dumped Me; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; and Ode to Joy. She starred on the television series Unforgettable and has had guest appearances on The Good Wife, 48 Hours ’til Monday, The Good Fight, Broad City, and most recently, United We Fall and Godmothered. Her most recent film, Queen Bees, was released in 2021.
Peter Mark Kendall’s stage credits include Six Degrees of Separation on Broadway, and in productions with The Acting Company, The Atlantic, Lincoln Center, The New Group, The Vineyard Theatre, and more. He can be seen in the films Entangled, Time Out of Mind, Louder Than Bombs, The Ticket, Seven Lovers, The Scottish Play, and on television in Girls, The Americans, Chicago Med, Eye Candy, Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, The Good Fight, Gotham, The Leftovers, and Public Morals. He is a founding member of the theater collective The Commissary and is in the duo-band Hickory. He co-wrote, co-scored, and starred in the film Capsule. Kendall will appear in Netflix’s Jigsaw and the feature film Top Gun: Maverick.
Claire Messud is the author of six novels, including The Emperor’s Children, The Woman Upstairs, and The Hunters, and an autobiography in essays, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Karen Pittman is best known for featured roles on The Morning Show, The Americans, Marvel’sLuke Cage, Yellowstone, Living with Yourself, and Homeland. Her numerous stage credits include Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced, for which she received the 2015 Theatre World Award, and Pipeline, which was adapted into a film, and for which Pittman was nominated for Lucille Lortel and Broadway League’s Distinguished Performance awards. She can be seen in the forthcoming films What We Do Next, Allies, and the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That…
James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God. Wood’s collection Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019, was published in 2020.
CREDITS
“y = mx+b” by Andrew Altschul, published in Ploughshares (Winter 2008-09). Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Altschul. Used by permission of the Ross Yoon Agency.
“I Happy Am” by Jamel Brinkley, from A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Jamel Brinkley. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
