April's Affections and Intrigues: Love and Mystery Bloom
Sarah Vowell
Sarah
Vowell has turned her gimlet eye -- and razor-sharp tongue
-- toward everything from her father’s homemade (and
life-size) cannon and her obsession with the Godfather films,
to the New Hampshire primary and her Cherokee ancestors’
forced march on the Trail of Tears. Vowell is best known for
her
monologues and documentaries for public radio’s This
American Life. A contributing editor for the program since
1996, she has been a staple of TAL’s popular live
shows around the country, for which The New York Times
has commended her "funny querulous voice and shrewd comic
delivery." Thanks to her first book, Radio
On: A Listener's Diary, Newsweek named her its "Rookie
of the Year" for non-fiction in 1997, calling her "a
cranky stylist with talent to burn."
Reviewing her second book,
the essay collection Take
the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, People magazine
said, "Wise, witty and refreshingly warm-hearted, Vowell’s
essays on American history, pop culture and her own family
reveal
the bonds holding together a great, if occasionally weird,
nation."
Her third book, The
Partly Cloudy Patriot, was a national bestseller. Its audio
version features the voices of Norman Lear, Paul Begala, and
Conan
O'Brien with music by They Might Be Giants. Vowell's fourth
book,
titled Assassination
Vacation (April 2005), is a hilarious and haunting road trip
through the tourist destinations of the three assassinated
American
Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Its audio book
features
Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Tony Kushner and Stephen King
with music by Michael Giacchino.
As a critic and reporter,
Sarah Vowell has contributed to numerous newspapers and
magazines,
including Esquire, GQ, Los Angeles Times,
The Village Voice, Spin, The New York Times
Book
Review and McSweeney’s. She is a former columnist
for Time,
Salon.com and San Francisco Weekly. Her essays appear
in The Rose and the Briar, The Future Dictionary of
America, Dial-A-Song: Twenty Years of They Might Be
Giants,
Marcel Dzama’s The Berlin Years and Richard Ross’
Waiting for the End of the World. Vowell is a fellow at
the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. She is the
voice
of teenage superhero Violet Parr in Brad Bird’s The
Incredibles,
a Pixar Animation Studios film; she produced the documentary
short
"Vowellet," about becoming an action figure while
researching presidential assassinations, for the forthcoming
Incredibles
DVD. She has made numerous appearances on The Late Show with
David Letterman and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,
and is a regular on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
She is president of the board of 826NYC,
a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for students ages 6-18
in Brooklyn.