Literary Hub

Emily Bernard and Nell Freudenberger on How Silence Doesn’t Save You

Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York’s famous Joe’s Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a book—usually new, sometimes classic and occasionally obscure but always worth knowing about.

You may remember Nell Freudenberger from Episode 7 of Bookable when she talked to Amanda about the metaphase typewriter (used to communicate with the dead) and her New York Times bestselling novel Lost and Wanted. Nell returns with Black is the Body author Emily Bernard. Emily and Nell cover a lot of ground, including the role race plays in their interracial friendship.

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Emily Bernard was born and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and received her PhD in American studies from Yale University. She has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the NEH, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Resident Fellowship at Harvard University. Her essays have been published in journals and anthologies, among them The American Scholar, Best American Essays, and Best African American Essays. She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and the story collection Lucky Girls, which was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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