New Beginnings

Philip K. Dick was a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction. A number of his stories have been made into films, including “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was the inspiration for Blade Runner.

One of Dick’s fans is the graphic artist and writer Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly curated an evening of stories at Symphony Space, and chose “Beyond Lies the Wub,” which Speigelman introduces briefly here. Dick, he says, was not a great writer, but he was a great philosopher, whose sometimes ungainly fictions tackle large questions. In the case of "Beyond Lies the Wub," the question is "What does it mean to be human?"

Reader Denis O'Hare has played some human and inhuman characters, starring as a vampire in the television series True Blood and in American Horror Story. Other television credits include True Blood and The Good Wife. He has also appeared in such films as Milk, Dallas Buyers Club, HBO’s The Normal Heart, Michael Clayton, A Mighty Heart, Duplicity, 21 Grams, Garden State, Half Nelson, and Changeling. He won a Tony Award for his performance in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out and a Drama Desk Award for his role in Sweet Charity. He is the co-writer, with Lisa Peterson, and star of An Iliad, which was performed at the New York Theatre Workshop and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica; and he and Peterson have also co-authored a play about the bible, The Good Book, which premiered at the Court Theatre in Chicago. His upcoming work includes The Normal Heart (for HBO) and the films The Pyramid and The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Our second of two stories about new beginnings is Lara Vapnyar’s “Waiting for the Miracle.” The young man is this story is fresh off a plane from Moscow, and can’t wait to experience the New York City of his dreams. Lara Vapnyar is the author of the novels Memoirs of a Muse, The Scent of Pine, and Still Here, as well as the short story collections There Are Jews in My House and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Zoetrope, Harper’s, The New Republic, Vogue, Open City, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and her work has been honored with the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Vapnyar teaches creative writing at Columbia and NYU. "Waiting for the Miracle," first appeared in The New Yorker.

Reader David Costabile is best known for his television work on The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, Damages, Breaking Bad, and Suits, and has also appeared on Murphy Brown andBetter Get Saul. On Broadway, he has appeared in Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Translations, the musical Titanic, The Tempest, and at the Public Theater in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Caroline, or Change. His films include Solid Man, The Bounty Hunter, Side Effects, Runner Runner, Lincoln, and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Costabile can currently be seen in Showtime’s Billions.