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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
This feature-length documentary, directed and produced by Doug Wilson, explores how the Linotype type casting machine (called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Thomas Edison) revolutionized printing and society and had a suprisingly powerful impact on people's lives.
Good question! Watch as Richard from AbeBooks explains that the unique aroma comes from the reaction of a book's organic material to heat, light, moisture, and the chemicals used in its production. What's your favorite-smelling book?
"Wherever you're from sucks / and wherever you grew up sucks." For the latest video installment from Motionpoems, Amy Schmitt designed and animated Erin Belieu's poem "When at a Certain Party in NYC."
This two-channel video installation by Nancy Stamatopoulou and Ash Bulayev, part of last year's Athens Video Art Festival, is inspired in part by Gertude Stein's essay “The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind.”
One proud parent put together this amusing video of poet-toddler Elliot who, like all the great bards, uses "the fewest words to convey the greatest meaning."
In one of the darkest book trailers in recent memory, Erin Cosgrove presents this short film based on Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet, published this month by Knopf. "In the beginning was the word, and it made people sick..."
The Broken Tower, the Hart Crane biopic writen, directed, and starring James Franco, was released this week and can now be downloaded or viewed on demand. There's been a lot of speculation about the film ever since Franco aquired the rights to Paul Mariani's biography of the same title, but at least one critic isn't impressed. Writing in Slate, Evan Hughes called the film "incredibly dull."
Did you read the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine? Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein star in Portlandia, currently in its second season on the Independent Film Channel.
Alberto Chimal of Mexico City reads his story "Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" from Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, published this month by Small Beer Press.
"The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the writing life: space. I just think of space. Time to daydream. Time to notice things," says Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala, 1986), Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life (Bantam, 1990), and other books on writing.
