PODCAST · arts
Big Table
by J.C. Gabel
The BIG TABLE podcast is about books and conversation, an exploration into art and culture, as told through interviews with authors, conducted and curated by writer, editor, historian and publisher J.C. Gabel and a small cast of contributors, all former colleagues and friends.This podcast is a co-production between Hat & Beard, Dublab, and Gold-diggers in Los Angeles, and is dedicated to the interviewing style and enduring memory of Studs Terkel, the Chicago oral historian, actor, activist, TV pioneer, and long-time radio host and author.BIG TABLE is the first digital initiative of Invisible Republic, a nonprofit arts organization, working in coordination with Future Roots, Inc.
Episodes
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Episode 56: Evelyn McDonnell on Joan Didion
In Evelyn McDonnell’s The World According to Joan Didion, readers will find an intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of the revered and influential writer Joan Didion. As a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, Didion was a writer’s writer—a keen observer…
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Episode 55: Adaptation with Cord Jefferson & Percival Everett
We have a special edition of The Big Table Podcast on today’s episode. Presenting Adaptation, the inaugural event of a new literary salon series and collaboration between USC’s Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab and Soho House. Adaptation will feature conversations between writers and...
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Episode 54: Prudence Peiffer
Prudence Peiffer’s first book, The Slip, is the never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there. For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a cluster of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses became the…
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Episode 53: Two Poets in Conversation
As we prime our book club model for post-COVID growth, we are programming a couple of longer late-summer episodes about our own books via Hat & Beard Press. To support Big Table or Hat & Beard, join our book clubs. You can find out more about them at hatandbeard.com. Your support fuels our books,...
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Episode 52: A Chapter about Slime
File Under: Slime by Christopher Michlig — a cultural history of Slime — was recently published by Hat & Beard Editions. What is slime? We are well acquainted with its qualities in conjunction with certain things from which we tend to recoil but to which we are also at times attracted. Despite...
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Episode 51: Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss & Why They Matter
For Big Table episode 51, editors Joshua Glenn & Rob Walker discuss their latest book, Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter. Is there a “Rosebud” object in your past? A long-vanished thing that lingers in your memory—whether you want it to or not? As much as we…
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Episode 50: dublab: Live from NeueHouse
We are on episode 50! Thank you all for listening along over the last couple of years. This one is special as it features a book published by Hat & Beard Press, one of Big Table’s main partners in cultural pursuits. dublab: Future Roots Radio is the long-awaited book telling the story of the...
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Episode 49: Tim Carpenter
To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An Essay with Digressions by Tim Carpenter is a book-length essay about photography’s unique ability to ease the ache of human mortality. It’s also a book about photography theory, literary criticism, art history, and philosophy. Drawing on writings and poems...
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Episode 48: Steven Heller
THE INTERVIEW: After 100 books on design, Steven Heller has given us a coming-of-age memoir. The award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times has included 100 color photographs in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York, a 224-page...
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Episode 47: Bruce Adams
It is fitting that Bruce Adams’s new book, the sardonically-titled You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago and the Reinvention of Indie Music, begins at Jim’s Grill off Irving Park Road in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side: It was the first place I remember seeing a promotional poster for...
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Episode 46: Darryl Pinckney's Literary Education
Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and...
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Episode 45: Nicole Rudick on Niki de Saint Phalle
Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works celebrating the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination, and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance―a process connecting life to art. In this unconventional, illuminated…
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Episode 44: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community...
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Episode 43: Hua Hsu
The Interview: In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream. For Hua, the…
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Episode 42: Nick Drnaso
Nick Drnaso, acclaimed author of Sabrina, is back with Acting Class, his third book on Drawn & Quarterly. A tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation, Acting Class brings together 10 strangers under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of...
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Episode 41: Ada Calhoun and Frank O'Hara, Her Father and the New York School of Poets and Painters
In her latest book, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Atlantic, 2022), Ada Calhoun traces her fraught relationship with her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared obsession with the poet Frank O’Hara. The book features exclusive material from archival...
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Episode 40: Alexandra Lange on America’s Malls
In The Design of Childhood, acclaimed writer, architecture critic, and historian Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. Lange now turns her sharp eye to another subject we thought we knew. Chronicling the invention of the mall by postwar architects and...
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Episode 39: Ben Shattuck on Thoreau
A 170-plus years ago, Henry David Thoreau began his legendary hermit walks in New England. Many of these walks were published later as some of his most cherished works as a naturalist: Walden, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. Artist, writer and New England native Ben Shattuck does the same in Six...
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Episode 38: Paul Morley on Tony Wilson
To write about Tony Wilson, aka Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities, a clique of unreliable narrators, constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and the Haçienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy...
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Episode 37: Mark Rozzo on Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward in 1960s L.A.
Mark Rozzo’s astute and engaging new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1906s Los Angeles, published by Ecco Press, documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward in the heyday as New Hollywood’s It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of the Los Angeles...
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Episode 36: Dan Charnas on J Dilla
The Episode J Dilla—aka James Dewitt Yancey or Jaydee as he was previously known—was a musical genius who was hardly known to mainstream audiences during his brief life. In Dilla Time—equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history—hip hop historian and NYU professor Dan Charnas…
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Episode 35: Daniel Efram on Steve Keene
The Interview It’s not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years. Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when…
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Episode 34: Adam Clair on the Elephant 6 Collective
Adam Clair was barely out of undergrad when he began the manuscript for Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery (Hachette Books, 2022). The book is a definitive history of the 1990s underground musical movement known as the Elephant 6 Collective. Founded by Robert Schneider…
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Episode 33: José Vadi on California
José Vadi grew up in California’s Inland Empire, but his roots go back to Puerto Rico and Mexico. His abuelo, or grandfather, was an Okie who hopped freight trains west to Nebraska and then on to California, the promised land. Like many immigrants, he worked for a time as a migrant worker in the...
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Episode 32: Carole Angier on W.G. Sebald
The Interview: Although he did experience some fanfare in his lifetime, German writer, academic, and novelist W.G. Sebald—Max to his friends and colleagues—died 20 years ago in a car crash near his adoptive home in Norwich, England. He was only 58. His postmodern novels—Vertigo, The Emigrants…
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Episode 31: Robert Gottlieb on Greta Garbo
Interview: As one of the most influential book editors of his generation—first at Simon & Shuster and then, for many years, at Knopf and Random House, Robert Gottlieb has lived a charmed life. He was also one of the few storied editors of The New Yorker in the 1990s. Gottlieb’s other two passions...
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Episode 30: Emily Rapp Black Discusses Frida Kahlo
After seeing Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas,” writer and professor Emily Rapp Black felt an intense connection with the famous Mexican artist—maybe one of the most recognized faces in the world. Rapp Black has been an amputee since childhood. She grew up with a succession of prosthetic...
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Episode 29: Jason Jules
Jason Jules is a writer, blogger, stylist, brand consultant, and devotee of the Ivy look, albeit in a quite subverted form. The face of Drakes of London and writer of the John Simons documentary film A Modernist, Jules is widely recognized as the most stylish man in London media and culture....
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Episode 28: Rosecrans Baldwin on Los Angles as City-State
The Interview: Los Angeles is a hundred suburbs in search of a city, or so it’s been said. In his new book about Los Angeles, novelist and nonfiction writer Rosecrans Baldwin—a somewhat recent transplant to Los Angeles from the East Coast—tackles the famous quip and expands on it. His premise in...
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Episode 27: Daniel Oppenheimer on Dave Hickey
The Interview: Dave Hickey was an inspirational character—a writer of essays and songs, an astute art and literary critic, a one-time gallerist and, certainly, an art-world provocateur. Hickey published his two most famous books in the 1990s, The Invisible Dragon—a call to reconsider beauty in...
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Episode 26: Norman Ohler
The Interview: Like many readers in the States, I first became aware of Norman Ohler’s work after reading Blitzed (2015), his epic history of drug use in the Third Reich. The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Ohler’s follow up—which...
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Episode 25: Warren Ellis On His First Book Nina Simone’s Gum
The Interview: Musician Warren Ellis’ first book, Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber & Faber, 2021), is a magical journal mixing memoir, cultural history, reportage, and travelogue. The memorable title comes from the Meltdown Festival, a concert series his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, curated in London...
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Episode 24: Joan Didion in the 1970s, 1980s & 1990s
The Interview: For over 50 years, Joan Didion, a daughter of California, has been in a league all her own, as a writer and novelist. Unlike many critics, she is capable of writing memorable fiction that, although not as widely read as her reportage and singular essays, stands the test of time.…
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Episode 23: Matthew Specktor
The Interview: Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a talent agent and screenwriter. One of his childhood heroes was the doomed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930s to eke out a living as a screenwriter while he labored on what ended up being his...
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Episode 22: Kyle Beachy
The Interview: Kyle Beachy has been skateboarding for as long as he’s been creating stories. For him, the two have always been intertwined. After releasing the coming-of-age novel The Slide in 2009, he began to write more seriously about skateboarding, as aficionado, critic, and essayist. A...
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Episode 21: Nathaniel Rich
The Interview: With the world leaders of the G20 having met about climate change last week and the upcoming United Nations climate summit happening in Scotland this week, we’re airing our conversation from a few months back with journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, who began to more steadily...
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Episode 20: Peter Mendelsund
The Interview: Peter Mendelsund began his career as a concert pianist, and reinvented himself as a graphic designer, now creative director, almost by accident. He came to book design—first as a reader, then as an independent bookstore employee, and ultimately, as a book cover designer, which he...
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Episode 19: Jona Frank
The Interview: On this episode of Big Table, artist and photographer Jona Frank talks with J.C. Gabel about her visual memoir, Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (Monacelli Press), which documents, in elaborately staged sets, her troubled childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey.…
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Episode 18: The Future of the Internet with Damian Bradfield and Joanne McNeil
The Interview: On this episode of Big Table, J.C. Gabel talks with We Transfer co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Damian Bradfield about his first book The Trust Manifesto: What You Need to Do to Create a Better Internet (Penguin Press), which imagines and outlines a path toward a better...
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Episode 17: William Sites on Sun Ra
The Interview: In Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (The University of Chicago Press), William Sites brings the cosmic musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961, he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of...
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Episode 16: Lucy Sante
Episode 16: Lucy Sante THE INTERVIEW Since her debut book, Lowlife: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Lucy Sante has charted her own path, not only as a writer of distinction, but as a writer who has created a genre all her own in the process. Her books include The Other Paris, a sequel of sorts…
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Episode 14: Brigitte Benkemoun on Dora Maar
The Interview: Brigitte Benkemoun, an investigative reporter in France, buys a vintage address book online for her partner, and soon discovers that it belonged to artist/photographer Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress, infamous “weeping woman,” and unsung hero of the surrealist movement. Finding Dora...
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Episode 13: Yuval Taylor on Zora Neale Hurston & Langston Hughes
The Interview: Yuval Taylor’s dual biography Zora & Langston (Norton), documents the lives, times, and work of novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and poet and writer Langston Hughes, two towering pillars of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. Taylor writes about their intimate…
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Episode 12: Cey Adams & Janette Beckman
THE INTERVIEW Photographer Janette Beckman and artist/art director Cey Adams (who helmed the art department at the legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Records in its 1980s and '90s heyday) discuss their graffiti art and photography collaboration The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti...
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Big Table Episode 11: Mariella Guzzoni on Vincent Van Gogh
The Interview: In Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him (University of Chicago Press), Italian curator Mariella Guzzoni unpacks her year’s long research into the books that Vincent Van Gogh read throughout his life and how they influenced and inspired his painting and…
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Big Table Episode 10: William Deresiewicz
The Interview William Deresiewicz documents “how creators are struggling to survive in the age of billionaires and big tech,” which is the subtitle of his masterful new book, The Death of the Artist (Henry Holt). This book is a well-written examination of the creative economy, and how it has been...
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Big Table Episode 9: Geoff Dyer
The Interview: Geoff Dyer discusses “Broadsword Calling Danny Boy”: Watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’, published by Pantheon, his study of the 1969 action film featuring a young Clint Eastwood in one of his first starring roles, alongside Richard Burton. The Reading: Dyer reads from his latest book...
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Big Table Episode 8: George Orwell
The Interview: Two distinguished Orwell scholars, John Rodden and D.J. Taylor, unpack the Orwell enigma: fact, fiction, myth and the most enduring legacy of any writer in the English language since Shakespeare. Rodden’s most recent Orwell book is Become George Orwell (Princeton University Press)...
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Big Table Episode 7: Ninth Street Women
THE INTERVIEW Journalist, author and biographer and Mary Gabriel discusses Ninth Street Women, published by Little, Brown, a five part biography of painters from the Abstract Expressionist era: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. This…
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Big Table Episode 6: Nelson Algren
The Interview: Biographer Colin Asher, discusses the legacy of one of the greatest unknown American writers, Nelson Algren, a pre-Beat Generation realist who also took the Underground Man to new heights in the 1930s thru the 1970s, writing from the working man and woman’s perspective in Chicago…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The BIG TABLE podcast is about books and conversation, an exploration into art and culture, as told through interviews with authors, conducted and curated by writer, editor, historian and publisher J.C. Gabel and a small cast of contributors, all former colleagues and friends.This podcast is a co-production between Hat & Beard, Dublab, and Gold-diggers in Los Angeles, and is dedicated to the interviewing style and enduring memory of Studs Terkel, the Chicago oral historian, actor, activist, TV pioneer, and long-time radio host and author.BIG TABLE is the first digital initiative of Invisible Republic, a nonprofit arts organization, working in coordination with Future Roots, Inc.
HOSTED BY
J.C. Gabel
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Big Table have?
Big Table currently has 55 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Big Table about?
The BIG TABLE podcast is about books and conversation, an exploration into art and culture, as told through interviews with authors, conducted and curated by writer, editor, historian and publisher J.C. Gabel and a small cast of contributors, all former colleagues and friends.This podcast is a...
How often does Big Table release new episodes?
Big Table has 55 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Big Table?
You can listen to Big Table on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Big Table?
Big Table is created and hosted by J.C. Gabel.
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