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“I like questions, my imagination likes them too.” In this A Word on Word series video, Alexander Chee speaks about his essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018), and his writing process which involves engaging in conversation with his fictional characters.
“To deprivatize is not the same as to make public. A field is only natural or private after so much hurt.” In this short film, Jos Charles offers a preface for her poetry collection feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
“It is not what drove your body here like a stolen car. / why you abandoned it on this unreasonable ledge....” This Button Poetry video features sam sax’s poem “Gay Boys & the Bridges Who Love Them” from his second collection, Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and is directed by Seth Moore and Cole Smothers with choreography by Matthew Bovee and Sarah Adam.
“I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind / and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.“ Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry, 2018), reads their poem “The Nutritionist” for this animated TED-Ed film directed by Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat.
Vita & Virginia is a film adaptation of Eileen Atkins’s 1992 play of the same name, based on love letters Virginia Woolf exchanged over the course of a decade-long affair with Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration behind Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography. Directed by Chanya Button, the biopic stars Gemma Arterton as West, Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini as Baroness Sackville.
“The extraordinary thing about this book is it talks of a world in transition—philosophically, politically, intellectually, socially—and that is the age that we live in now.” Bettany Hughes, chair of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and fellow judges speak about Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press, 2018) written by Jokha Alharthi and translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, which won this year’s award. Alharthi is the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, and the first author from the Arabian Gulf to win the prize.
“Gaudí believed in holy sound / and built a cathedral to contain it, / pulling hearing men from their knees...” Raymond Antrobus reads his poem “Echo” and discusses his debut poetry collection, The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.
“I went through a Philip Glass phase, but I’m out of that now. Lately I write to silence, usually.” In this Vintage Books interview, Kayo Chingonyi answers questions about his literary and pop culture influences, daily routine, and books he thinks everyone should read. Chingonyi won the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut poetry collection, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017).
“As a photographer my looking really changed, it really did become sacred....” In this Louisiana Channel video, Teju Cole talks about and reads from his book of photography and text, Blind Spot (Random House, 2017), which was inspired by a short period of blindness in one eye that transformed his perspective on looking and attentiveness. The book is comprised of over a hundred fifty photographs interspersed with short lyrical prose pieces.
“I picked up languages the way some people pick up viruses. I was armed with literature.” In this video by Alma Books, Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi reads an excerpt from her novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), for which she won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
