In Conversation: A Whisper to a Scream

Ben Greenman is a New York Times bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. His novels and short-story collections include The Slippage and Superbad. He collaborated with Questlove on Mo’ Meta Blues and Something to Food About, and he has written memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson.  His writing has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, McSweeney’s, and Rolling Stone. The owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, Greenman has been listening to and writing about Prince since the mid-eighties. With the passion of an obsessive fan and the skills of a critic, journalist, and novelist, in Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince (Henry Holt and Co.), Greenman mines his encyclopedic knowledge of Prince’s music to tell both his story and the story of his paradigm-shifting ideas. His take on Prince is the autobiography of a generation and its ideas. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Greenman’s brilliant book celebrates a musician who crammed substance into every corner of his music.”

Chuck Palahniuk‘s novels include the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film, Diary, Lullaby, Survivor, Haunted, and Invisible Monsters. His nonfiction work has been published by Gear, Black Book, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Times. Gates Foster lost his daughter, Lucy, seventeen years ago. He’s never stopped searching. Suddenly, a shocking new development provides Foster with his first major lead in over a decade, and he may finally be on the verge of discovering the awful truth. Meanwhile, Mitzi Ives has carved out a space as an artist creating the sounds giving Hollywood films their authenticity. She’s an industry-leading expert in the sound of violence and horror. Soon Foster and Ives find themselves on a collision course that threatens to expose the violence hidden beneath Hollywood’s glamorous façade. The Invention of Sound (Grand Central Publishing) is Chuck Palahniuk reflection on the commodification of suffering and the dangerous power of art. Publishers Weekly called it a “dark, humorous tale [that] sparkles with the inventive details […] provocative insights […] and what it means to turn ‘people’s basic humanity into something that could be bought and sold.’ The result is a wry, devilish delight.”