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An Evening with Ben Yagoda & Roy Blount Jr.
Tuesday, February 10th, 7-8pm – Join Book Banter Books for a special evening celebrating Alias O. Henry, the new book from acclaimed writer and critic Ben Yagoda. Ben will be in conversation with New Orleans based author, reporter and regular Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! panelist Roy Blount Jr. for a lively discussion about the life, legacy, and enduring myths surrounding one of America’s most famous and elusive writers.
Together, Yagoda and Blount will explore storytelling, literary reputation, and the strange alchemy that turns a writer into a legend. Perfect for readers who love literary history, biography, and the stories behind the stories.
A curated selection of books, including Alias O. Henry, will be available for purchase at the event. A book signing will follow the discussion.
Alias O’Henry may be ordered on our website for pickup at the event.
O. Henry, born William Sidney Porter, arrived in New York City fresh from the Ohio Penitentiary, where he had served three and a half years for embezzlement. It was the dawn of the twentieth century, a time of remarkable change when the city’s physical presence was being altered by new skyscrapers and subways, and its character by waves of immigrants. The American magazine had just reached its pinnacle as an enterprise, and the short story was the most popular medium in entertainment. Porter was in the city to write. From his cell, he had already sold a number of stories to big magazines, and within five years of arriving in Manhattan, he would become the most successful fiction writer in the country. But he never–never–said anything about his prison experience, or, indeed, anything about his past life. Anything true, that is. In life as well as on the page, Porter was a yarn-spinner of the highest order
Ben Yagoda
Ben Yagoda is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books, most recently Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English (Princeton University Press, 2024) and O. Henry: 101 Stories (Library of America, 2021). He has written about language, writing, and many other topics for the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review and Magazine, Slate, The American Scholar, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and publications that start with every letter of the alphabet except X and Z. Yagoda has been awarded Guggenheim and MacDowell Fellowships to support his writing about O. Henry. His podcast, “The Lives They’re Living,” focuses on people whose achievements deserve renewed attention; episodes have included Gene Seymour on Ishmael Reed, Michael Tisserand on Jules Feiffer, Carrie Courogen on Elaine May, and Dwight Garner on Calvin Trillin. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Alias O. Henry is his first novel.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Roy Blount, Jr. is the author of more than twenty books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to what dogs are thinking to the ins and outs of etymology. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, he now divides his time between New Orleans and western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold, and their cat, Jimmy. Subscribe to his Substack Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now here.