Tickets
General Ticket: $25
Members: $20
Gayle Feldman, journalist and author of Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He built, invites you to dive deep into an epic story that The New York Times, in a rave review, compared to Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker. Her biography takes you inside the world of the founder of Random House, a man who later became a celebrity on What’s My Line? Cerf straddled books, Broadway, Hollywood, TV, and New York City.
Feldman will converse with award-winning journalist and critic Cathleen McGuigan. The two will explore how Feldman wrote this landmark cultural history, and venture into Cerf’s star-studded life. Following the discussion will be a Q&A with the audience and book signing.
Nothing Random, twenty-three years in the making, was hailed by The Washington Post as “a work of biographical reclamation [and] a whole lot of fun… in its pages, Feldman depicts a lost world, at times a lost paradise, when New York, Hollywood and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged.”
Cerf’s star-studded life stretched from William Faulkner to Dr. Seuss; George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra; Gertrude Stein to Judy Garland; FDR to Henry Kissinger.
He fought for free expression and helped transform which books could reach readers, and how they would be published and marketed. His legacy lives on every time someone reads Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Philip Roth, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and so many more. Former Sag Harbor residents Robert Loomis, Jason Epstein, and E.L. Doctorow were interviewed for this book, which was partly written in the John Jermain Library.
A special thank you to our community bookseller, Book Hampton, for partnering with us for this program.
GAYLE FELDMAN
Photo by Michael Lionstar
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Gayle has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, including as a senior staff editor, and since 1999 has been U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, where she analyzes the American book business for U.K. readers. She has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times of London, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications. Author of the cancer memoir You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother (W.W. Norton, 1994), she published Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books (2003) through a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported her work on Nothing Random with a Public Scholar award. She lives in Sag Harbor and New York City.
CATHLEEN MCGUIGAN
Photo by Jenna Beth Lyde Parish
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Journalist, critic, and editor Cathleen McGuigan is the former Editor-in-chief of Architectural Record magazine, which won numerous editorial awards under her leadership. Prior to that, she was a longtime cultural writer and the arts editor at Newsweek. Besides Newsweek and Record, her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. A graduate of Brown University, she spent a year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design as a Loeb Fellow and has been honored as a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects with the Architecture in Media award. She sits on Sag Harbor’s Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review, as well as the boards of the New York Review of Architecture and the Skyscraper Museum. She is a co-author of the book Out There: New Architecture Across America, to be published in June.