Happy Ending Music and Reading Series: America Night featuring Jonathan Dee ("The Privileges"), Rich Benjamin (Whitopia), Colum McCann and musical guest Jim White

Show Description

The consistently sold out, Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, chosen by New York Magazine and NY Press as the best reading series in NYC, and singled out by the New York Times Magazine for helping to "Keep downtown alive," features the most interesting storytellers, writers, musicians, raconteurs and personalities, and requires the readers to take one public risk, while the musicians, who perform two short sets with their original, lyric-driven music, are required to play one cover song and try to get the audience to sing along. Called the “most vital authors’ series in the city,” by Time Out NY, and known for its consistently good taste, Happy Ending has launched careers and proudly, ended none.

--------------- 

Rich Benjamin is author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, and Senior Fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan national think tank.  Barbara Ehrenreich calls his book “a daring feat of 21st Century exploration that will have you laughing and shuddering at the same time,” while Time magazine favorably likened him to Sacha Baron Cohen.  Searching for Whitopia was selected for the 2009 Editor's Choice Award by Booklist (American Library Association). Benjamin’s social and political commentary is featured on television, on NPR and Fox radio, in major newspapers and magazines, and in scholarly venues. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. from Stanford.  Please visit him at www.richbenjamin.com

Jonathan Dee's fifth novel, The Privileges, will be published in January by Random House.  He is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper’s, and a former senior editor of the Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.

Jim White is a prophet of human loss who sings about Southern misfits in a sly, haunted tenor. Saved as a Pentecostal at fifteen and lost again shortly thereafter, White did stints as a professional surfer, fashion model, taxi driver, and filmmaker before his music was discovered by David Byrne...