Join a conversation between the James Joyce Society and Elevator Repair Service on Joyce’s birthday!

RSVP link to come.

John Collins founded Elevator Repair Service in 1991. Since then, he has directed or co-directed all of the company’s productions and also serves as the company’s artistic director. ERS productions directed by Collins include Ulysses, Cab Legs, Room Tone, Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), The Sound and the Fury, Arguendo, and numerous others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship and a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.

Scott Shepherd has been a member of Elevator Repair Service since 1994 when he played a drunk passed out on a radiator in McGurk: A Cautionary Tale. Other ERS appearances include Gatz, Measure for Measure, Cab Legs, and most recently Ulysses, which he co-directed. He has also worked with The Wooster Group for over 25 years, performing in Hamlet, The Town Hall Affair, Poor Theater, and To You, The Birdie!, among others. He won Obie Awards for Gatz and Poor Theater. His screen credits include The Phoenician Scheme, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Last of Us, First Cow, El Camino, True Detective, The Young Pope, and Bridge of Spies.

Conversation facilitated by…

Gregory Erickson is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School, where he teaches courses on modern literature, James Joyce, popular culture, and religion. He is the author of The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), the co-author, with Richard Santana, of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (McFarland, 2008; 2016), and the co-editor of the collection Reading Heresy: Religion and Dissent in Literature and Art (De Gruyter 2017). His two most recent books are Christian Heresy, James Joyce and the Modernist Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury 2022) and Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion (Routledge 2022). He is a founding member and former president of the International Society for Heresy Studies. He is also a part time professional trombone player.

Please join the James Joyce Society for our latest installment in our Lunchtime Launch Series:

Nothing Random by Gayle Feldman

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls by Adam Morgan

Presentations by both authors, followed by a Q&A/Discussion (moderated by James Joyce Society President, Jonathan Ezra Goldman)

This event will meet over Zoom. RSVP required (forthcoming).

At midcentury, Bennett Cerf was a household name—witty, widely-beloved, fun-loving, and a familiar face each week as a panelist on What’s My Line? But before television made him a national personality, Cerf was a visionary force who transformed publishing in America. In her landmark biography, NOTHING RANDOM: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built (Random House hardcover; On Sale: 1/13/26), Gayle Feldman reveals the driven, paradoxical young man who vowed to become a great publisher—and did. Over two decades in the making, and drawing on more than 200 interviews, previously unavailable private letters, and extensive archival research, Feldman brings Cerf’s story vividly to life.

Gayle Feldman, New York based, has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, including as a senior staff editor; since 1999, as U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, she has analyzed the American book business for U.K. readers; and she has contributed features and reviews on books to The New York Times, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and others. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Times of London. She is the author of the cancer memoir You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother, published by W.W. Norton, and was awarded a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University through which she published Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books, which she discussed on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s On the Media. The National Endowment for the Humanities has supported her work on Nothing Random with a Public Scholar Award.

Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C. Anderson’s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. And as its publisher, Anderson was a target. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early 20th century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women’s suffrage, access to birth control, and LBGTQ rights.

Author, journalist, and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever.

Adam Morgan is a culture journalist and critic who lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His writing regularly appears in Esquire, and has also been published in The Paris Review, Scientific American, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and more. He spent a decade in Chicago, during which time he founded the Chicago Review of Books and covered the city’s arts and culture for Chicago magazine and the Chicago Reader.