Author Talk with Tom Roston of The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World

Tom Roston’s most recent book is The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five. He previously spent three years researching, reporting and writing The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World.

Roston has been writing and editing stories about culture, food and life in New York City for more than 20 years. He has profiled a long list of dynamic subjects, from documentarian Ken Burns to actor Tom Cruise, from chef Jose Andres to Judge Judy. He drove across Montana with Viggo Mortensen, got tattoos (not matching) with Angelina Jolie in Montreal, drank whiskey with Jane Goodall and translated Khmer worders into English for Kurt Vonnegut. In The Quantum Prophets, he sought to uncover what lies beneath the intellectual battle between Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra. And I lost it at the video store: A Filmmakers’ Oral History of a Vanished Era, he constructed a narrative chronicle of a creative movement from interviews with filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell and Allison Anders.

Roston started out at The Nation and Vanity Fair, and worked for ten years at Premiere. His writing appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Fast Company and Salon, among other publications. in addition to being a freelance journalist, he has worked as a Ghost Rider and as a writing consultant to the city of New York for many years. he lives in Brooklyn, where he mostly avoids writing about himself in the third person.