Coming and Going

James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was a writer and civil rights activist. He wrote more than a dozen novels and essay collections, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Though he expatriated to Paris in 1948, Baldwin’s work deals primarily with the social and cultural issues of being black and homosexual in America before and during the civil rights movement. His unfinished work, Remember This House, was adapted into the award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro in 2016, and a film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk was released in 2018. Today his legacy lives on through the National James Baldwin Literary Society and the James Baldwin Scholars program at Hampshire College.

Stephen Colbert currently hosts the Emmy and Peabody Award–winning #1 show in late night, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He previously hosted The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, following his work as a correspondent on The Daily Show. The Report received two Peabody Awards, two Grammy Awards, and six Emmy Awards. Colbert has served as producer on Hell of a Week with Charlamagne tha God, the Comedy Central series Stephen Colbert Presents Tooning Out the News, Showtime’s Our Cartoon President, Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself on Hulu, and the forthcoming After Hours on CBS. He has also authored five books, the most recent of which, Whose Boat Is This Boat?, reached #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. All proceeds from the book benefited the victims of Hurricane Florence and Michael, and most recently, COVID-19 relief.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 –1940), American short story writer and novelist, is known for his depictions of the Jazz Age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920, and gained him entry to literary magazines such as Scribner’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Among his other well-known works are Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, and The Last Tycoon.

Nathan Hinton recently appeared as Cecil on CBS’s The Equalizer. He began his professional career at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City and has performed with the Federal Hall Memorial Project; the Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina; Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC; Berkeley Repertory Theatre; Dallas Theatre Center; and the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, Massachusetts. Hinton was a member of the first national touring company of Angels in America and won the Barrymore Award for Excellence in Theatre as part of the ensemble of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out with the Philadelphia Theatre Company. Past television credits include Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Evil, FBI: Most Wanted, The Code, Manifest, and Madam Secretary.

Bhavesh Patel most recently appeared in Elyria with the Atlantic Theater Company. His additional theater credits include The Nap at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Present Laughter, opposite Kevin Kline on Broadway, War Horse and Hayden's Seven Last Words at Lincoln Center, Indian Ink at Roundabout, and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Public's Shakespeare in the Park. Additionally, he has appeared at Second Stage, Classic Stage Company, Red Bull Theater, and the New York Theatre Workshop. His recent television and film appearances include Marvel’s Spidey and His Amazing Friends and the indie film Late Bloomers, which premiered at the 2023 SXSW festival. Additional credits include Chicago PD, Law & Order: SVU, New Amsterdam, Little America, Bull, The Blacklist, Jon Glazer Loves Gear, Madame Secretary, The Mysteries of Laura, The Good Wife, The Sound of Silence, Gold, Wilding, Two Days in New York, James White, Maiden Heist,The Weekend, and You Should Have the Body. Patel is currently a professor of advanced acting at The New School.

A member of European Parliament and the Palermo city council, Leonardo Sciascia (1921 –1989) wrote essays and political investigative journalism, in addition to a series of novels, including Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) and A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own), and the story collection Il mare colore del vino (The Wine-Dark Sea).

Sarah Steele previously starred on CBS's The Good Fight, for which she won a Septimius Award for Best American Actress, and can be seen in the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She won an Independent Spirit Award for her ensemble work in Nicole Holofcener's Please Give and a Drama Desk for her ensemble work in Stephen Karam's The Humans. Steele graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature and sometimes makes weird dances on Instagram.

John Turturro is an actor and director whose notable film credits include Do the Right Thing; Barton Fink; Quiz Show; The Big Lebowski; The Truce; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Mia Madre; The Batman; and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. He is the director of six films, including Mac, which was honored with the Caméra d’Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, and most recently, The Jesus Rolls. On stage, he has appeared in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, for which was awarded an Obie, Italian-American Reconciliation, La Puta Vida, The Bald Soprano, Steel on Steel, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, End Game, and The Cherry Orchard. Turturro is also known for his television roles on Monk, for which he won an Emmy, The Night Of, The Bronx Is Burning, The Name of the Rose, The Plot Against America, and Severance. On stage, Turturro currently stars in Sabbath Theater, which he adapted from Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. Upcoming screen projects include Bless Me Father, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and the second season of Severance.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the grandmasters of modern American letters. Called by TheNew York Times "the counterculture's novelist," his works guided a generation through the miasma of war and greed that was life in the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Vonnegut rose to prominence with the publication of Cat's Cradle in 1963. Several modern classics, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; and Breakfast of Champions soon followed. Vonnegut’s letters, essays, and short stories have been anthologized in dozens of collections, including A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, and Complete Stories.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.

TRANSLATORS

Simon Carnell and Erica Segre are co-translators of three books by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, as well as books by Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio van Straten, Antonio Erediatato, and Paolo Cognetti. Their translations of Italian poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and in The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems. Erica Segre is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where she teaches Latin American Literature and Visual Art. Simon Carnell is the author of Hare.

CREDITS

An excerpt from Another Country, collected in James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (Library of America, 1998). First appeared in Another Country (Dial Press, 1956). Copyright © 1956 by James Baldwin.

"Three Hours Between Planes," by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Copyright © by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan, renewed by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith. From The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates.

“The Long Voyage” (“Il lungo viaggio”) from Il mare colore del vino (Adelphi, 2011). Copyright © Estate of Leonardo Sciascia. Used by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency. Translation copyright © 2019 Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

"City" by Kurt Vonnegut, currently collected in COMPLETE STORIES. Copyright © 2017 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.