Talk To Me From Wnyc

The Happy Ending Music and Reading series has formed a partnership with the arts colony Yaddo located in Saratoga Springs, New York, to present programs featuring writers who have been Yaddo fellows. On December 7th, curator Amanda Stern welcomed three Yaddo alums at the series’ performance home, Joe’s Pub, for a program entitled “Reality and Scandal.”  Two of the authors, Helen Schulman and Jesse Browner, read from works featuring teenage boys in emotional, sexual and social turmoil — Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life" and Browner’s “Everything Happens Today.” This has been fruitful territory ever since J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caufield made such a hash of his prep school career 60 years ago. The third writer, Walter Kirn, went engagingly off course with excerpts from his New York Magazine-approved (as in the weekly “Approval Ratings”) Bible blog. The writer inherited a well-worn study edition of the “King James Bible” from his mother, and is offering up hilariously transgressive interpretations of the narrative