Since Richard Price is a lover of cities and their grit, we thought our final work would partner well with his picks. Written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Colson Whitehead's "Lost and Found" is a tribute to New York City, but makes the point that there isn't one New York. The city is shaped by the experience of each resident, and therefore exists both materially, and in memory. The essay is part of Whitehead’s collection The Colossus of New York. To read the piece, we got a great New Yorker and frequent Shorts reader, Alec Baldwin.
Artists and Writers:
Isaac Babel (1894 - 1940) was a translator and writer of short stories, plays, and nonfiction, considered to be one of the preeminent Russian-Jewish writers of his generation. He is best known for his works Red Cavalry, Story of My Dovecote, and Tales of Odessa, as well as the play Maria. Babel was targeted and executed during the Great Purge under Stalin. Many of his unpublished works have been lost or were destroyed after his arrest, and complete editions of his published works have only been made available in the last decade.
Alec Baldwin received two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards for his role in NBC’s 30 Rock. Baldwin has appeared in such films as Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd, Martin Scorsese's The Departed, The Aviator, Beetlejuice, Miami Blues, The Hunt for Red October, and The Cooler, for which he received an Oscar nomination. His theatre credits include Twentieth Century, Gross Points, Macbeth, and A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, for which he received a Tony Award nomination. He is a frequent host on Saturday Night Live, a columnist for The Huffington Post, and hosts the podcast Here’s The Thing.
Lucia Berlin (1936 - 2004) was a short story writer best known for her collection A Manual for Cleaning Women, which was published posthumously. Berlin produced six collections, and her work was featured in numerous publications, including The Atlantic. In addition, she was honored with the American Book Award in 1991 and won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Berlin taught creative writing at the University of Colorado, as well as the San Francisco County Jail and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
Maggie Gyllenhaal has starred in the films Donnie Darko, Secretary, Sherrybaby, Stranger than Fiction, The Dark Knight, Won’t Back Down, Crazy Heart, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Kindergarten Teacher. In 2014, Gyllenhaal made her Broadway debut in the revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. She was awarded a Golden Globe for her performance in the BBC miniseries The Honourable Woman. Additional stage credits include the Classic Stage Company’s productions of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters. Gyllenhaal currently stars in the HBO series The Deuce.
Richard Price is a novelist and screenwriter, known for the novels The Wanderers, Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and most recently, The Whites. A number of his works have been adapted into films, including The Color of Money, Sea of Love, and New York Stories. He has also written for the HBO series The Wire, The Night Of, and The Deuce. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The New Yorker, Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, among others. Price has taught at Binghamton University, Columbia, Yale University, and New York University. He was honored with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1999, and won the Writers Guild of America Award for his work on The Wire in 2008.
Josh Radnor is best known from his role as Ted Mosby on the hit CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother and has recently been seen in the series Mercy Street and Rise. He wrote, directed, and starred in two films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim: the Audience Award-winning happythankyoumoreplease and Liberal Arts. Additional film credits include Afternoon Delight, The Seeker, and Social Animals. He has starred on Broadway in The Graduate and Disgraced. Off-Broadway and regional credits include White Rabbit, Red Rabbit; The Babylon Line; and Little Shop of Horrors. Radnor will appear in the forthcoming series The Hunt.
Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels Zone One; Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award; John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award; and The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has also written a book of essays about his hometown, The Colossus of New York, and memoir The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Whitehead’s most recent novel, The Nickel Boys, was published this summer.
Rita Wolf was seen off-Broadway last year at The New York Theatre Workshop in the premiere of Hammaad Chaudhury's debut play An Ordinary Muslim and at The Flea Theatre in Emma and Max, written and directed by Todd Solondz. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her role in David Greig’s The American Pilot at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Additional New York theater credits include the premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop and later at BAM. Film credits include Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette and Spike Lee's Girl 6. Wolf stars in the Audible drama Evil Eye, a noir thriller written by Madhuri Shekar.
