Big Table
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.
- Update frequency
- every 16 days
- Average duration
- 30 minutes
- Episodes
- 55
- Years Active
- 2021 - 2024
Episode 56: Evelyn McDonnell on Joan Didion
Episode 55: Adaptation with Cord Jefferson & Percival Everett
Episode 54: Prudence Peiffer
Episode 53: Two Poets in Conversation
Episode 52: A Chapter about Slime
Episode 51: Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss & Why They Matter
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 cu…
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 …
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 c…
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…
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. Wh…
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 ri…
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 muc…
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 Japa…
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 strange…
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…
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…
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 Ma…
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.…
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 …