Ben Greenman (born September 28, 1969) is an American novelist, magazine journalist, and publishing executive who has written more than twenty fiction and non-fiction books, including collaborations with pop-music artists like Questlove, George Clinton, Brian Wilson, Gene Simmons, and others. His books have been translated into many other languages, including Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and more. From 2000 to 2014, he was an editor at The New Yorker. He now serves as executive editor of Auwa Books, an imprint founded by Questlove in collaboration with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Greenman was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Richard Greenman, an academic physician, and Bernadine Heller-Greenman, an art history professor. He has two younger brothers, Aaron and Josh. He lived briefly in Mountain View, California, and was raised in Miami, where he attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School, and then, after graduating in 1986, Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1990. After working at Miami New Times, Greenman enrolled in a Ph.D. program in literature at Northwestern University but left after earning his master's degree. He moved to New York City and worked for a variety of book packagers, publishers, and magazines, including Michael Wolff & Company and Yahoo! Internet Life. In 2000, he went to work at The New Yorker, where he was an editor until 2014.
Books
In 2001 McSweeneys published Greenman's debut, Superbad, a collection of humor pieces and serious short fiction that included several satirical musicals. It has the same title as, but not the same contents as, the popular teen comedy; Greenman engaged in a fake feud with Seth Rogen over the title. The book's cover art was a painting by the artist Mark Tansey.[1] Greenman's next book, Superworse, the Novel: A Remix of Superbad, was published in 2004 by Soft Skull, an independent Brooklyn publisher. It refashioned the book into a novel that was overseen and edited by a man named Laurence Once. Kirkus called it "something extraordinary."[2]
In 2007, Macadam/Cage published Greenman's second collection of stories. It was selected by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great Writers series, and included both comic work and more serious stories like "In the Air Room," which fictionalized the famous controversy over James McNeill Whistler and the Peacock Room.[3] Elizabeth Gold, writing on SFGate, said that "the best of the stories in this collection are more than funny."[4]
Correspondences
In 2008, Hotel St. George press released a handmade and letterpress-printed edition of Greenman's book Correspondences that included an intricate book casing that unfolded to reveal three accordion books and a postcard. The project was reviewed favorably by the Los Angeles Times[5] and Time Out.[6]
In 2009, Melville House published Greenman's second novel, which was a fictionalized biography of a funk-rock star based loosely on Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and others. The funk-rock star Swamp Dogg recorded a theme song for the book.[7] Later in 2009, Greenman signed with HarperCollins: the first book announced was What He's Poised To Do, an expanded paperback based on the material from Correspondences. The book was praised by Steve Almond in the Los Angeles Times.[8]
In 2010, Greenman adapted the short stories of the Russian master Anton Chekhov, updating them by replacing their characters with modern celebrities. Pop Matters, praising the collection, said "the very, very best of these stories make us weep."[9]
Greenman's novel, The Slippage, was published by Harper Perennial in 2013. The book included a character who was a chart artist and whose work consisted of meta-charts; Greenman created a number of them and posted them at ILoveCharts.com and McSweeneys, among other places. The New York Times praised the novel as "fluid and commanding."[10]
In the summer of 2016, Little A published Emotional Rescue, a collection of essays about pop music and relationships.[11][self-published source?]
Collaborations
Greenman has also collaborated on celebrity memoirs. His most frequent collaborator has been Questlove; he co-wrote the hip-hop memoir Mo Meta Blues (2014), a food-themed book called Something to Food About (2015), a book about creativity and innovation called Creative Quest (2016), a conceptual cookbook called Mixtape Potluck (2018), and two books of music history, Music is History (2021) and Hip-Hop is History (2024).[12] In addition, he wrote memoirs with the funk musician George Clinton[13], the funk musician Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, co-founder of the Beach Boys, Steven van Zandt, as well as with the actress Mariel Hemingway,[14]Gene Simmons of KISS,[15] and Simon Cowell of American Idol. The Questlove, Wilson, and Van Zandt books were best-sellers.[16][17]
Other work
Greenman's journalism and short fiction have appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker,[18] where he worked as an editor from 2000 to 2014, The Paris Review,[19]Zoetrope: All-Story.[20] He has also moderated many events, including Literary Death Match, Literary Upstart, and the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Ceremony.[21]
Greenman is also the executive editor at AUWA Books, a publishing imprint launched by Questlove in 2023.
Personal life
Greenman is married to art director Gail Ghezzi and has two children: Daniel and Jakob (6'2"), both of whom were born when the couple lived in Brooklyn. The family currently lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
— (2013). The Slippage: a novel. New York: Harper Perennial.
— (2017). Don Quixotic: a fiction. New York: AntiBookClub.
Short fiction
Collections
Greenman, Ben (2001). Superbad: stories and pieces. Brooklyn, NY: McSweeney's Books.
— (2007). A circle is a balloon and compass both: stories about human love. San Francisco: MacAdam Cage.
— (2008). Correspondences. Brooklyn, NY: Hotel St. George Press.[22]
— (2010). Celebrity Chekhov: stories by Anton Chekhov. Translated by Constance Garnett; adapted and celebritized by Ben Greenman. New York: Harper Perennial.
— (2010). What he's poised to do: stories. New York: Harper Perennial.
Non-fiction
Greenman, Ben (2016). Emotional rescue: essays on love, loss, and life – with a soundtrack. Little A.
— (2017). Dig if you will the picture: funk, sex, God and genius in the music of Prince. New York: Henry Holt.
Janet Clara Malcolm was an American writer, staff journalist at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague just before it became impossible to escape. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Malcolm wrote frequently about psychoanalysis and explored the relationship between journalist and subject. She was known for her prose style and for polarizing criticism of her profession, especially in her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, which has become a staple of journalism-school curricula.
Ahmir K. Thompson, known professionally as Questlove, is an American musician, drummer, record producer, disc jockey, filmmaker, music journalist, and actor. He is the drummer and joint frontman for the hip hop band the Roots. The Roots have been serving as the in-house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon since 2014, after having fulfilled the same role on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Questlove is also one of the producers of the cast album of the Broadway musical Hamilton. He is the co-founder of the websites Okayplayer and OkayAfrica. He is also known for the podcast Questlove Supreme. Additionally, he is an adjunct professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.
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Amanda Petrusich is an American music journalist. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books: Pink Moon (2007), It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (2008), and Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records (2014).
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