Adam Langer

Biographical information

Adam Langer is a journalist, playwright, filmmaker, and author of the novels Crossing California (Riverhead, 2004) and The Washington Cycle (Riverhead, 2005). His work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts (read by Teri Garr), in The Best Men's Stage Monologues 2000 (Smith & Kraus), and The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2000 (Smith & Kraus), as well as in forthcoming anthologies edited by Meredith Broussard and Neal Pollack. He is the author of three nonfiction reference works: City Smart Guide to Chicago, Film Festival Guide, and The Madness of Art. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other cities throughout the United States.

As a journalist, Langer has worked as a features writer and theater critic for the Chicago Reader, and has had his work published in numerous national newspapers and periodicals. He holds a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.A. from the University of Illinois. He was a winner of a National Arts Journalism fellowship at Columbia University (2000-2001). Over the years, Langer has worked as a radio news writer and producer, an actor, and a stand-up comedian. He has lectured on writing and journalism at numerous universities and has been a frequent radio and television guest in Chicago and New York. He was senior editor of Book Magazine, where he worked since the publication's founding in 1998. The fiction section Langer edited for the magazine was nominated for a 2003 National Magazine Award.

Discussion topics

Adam Langer has an extensive background in performance as a theater and film director and actor and stand-up comedian and incorporates a sense of theatricality into his presentations. His experience as senior editor of Book Magazine enables him to comment on the work of other contemporary and classic authors as well as his own.

• How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love T.S. Eliot
  This lecture concerns the author's struggle to embrace the works of authors who have achieved notoriety with their distressingly Anti-Semitic statements, i.e. T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, José Saramago, et al.
• Border Crossings
  As in his novels Crossing California and The Washington Cycle, which concern, physical border crossings in the Chicago Jewish community of West Rogers Park, the author discusses the border crossings in his own life and in the country, commenting on the growing Conservatism in the Chicago Jewish community and in the country at large.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
  The author has lectured extensively in colleges and high schools and discusses how the works of authors such as Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Graham Greene have enabled him to pursue a career as a writer.

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