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“The Nickel Academy becomes a proving ground for people’s goodness, for their tendency towards evil, and it proves character,” says Colson Whitehead about his latest novel, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday, 2019), in this video for the Get Lit virtual book club series with host of WNYC’s All Of It Alison Stewart.
“It was Dre who once said, / You lose something every day / Your mind on the way to the store / The floor on the way to your mind…” In this Ours Poetica video, Jacqueline Woodson reads “You Lose Something Every Day,” a poem from Willie Perdomo’s collection The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Books, 2019).
On The Kristen Arnett Show based at the Black Mountain Institute and presented by Literary Hub on Instagram Live, Arnett talks about launching the paperback edition of her first novel, Mostly Dead Things (Tin House Books, 2019), and discusses life during the pandemic with special guest Hanif Abdurraqib.
“We thought / Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning / Names in heat, in elements classical / Philosophers said could change us.” In this Paris Review video, Jericho Brown reads two poems from his most recent collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), for which he received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Filmed in 2019 in the woods of Decatur, Georgia, “Poets in Space” was directed and produced by Daniel Grossman and Sean Webley in collaboration with the poet Malachi Black.
In this 92Y video, Camille Rankine introduces Hanif Abdurraqib, who reads from his poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House Books, 2019), and Timothy Donnelly, who reads from his poetry collection The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019).
“We are cheating death, all the time, passing one overcrowded town, then another, and another.” This short animated film offers a preview of Tishani Doshi’s novel Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury Circus, 2019), which is shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2020.
In this Open Studio With Jared Bowen interview, playwright Kirsten Greenidge; Kerri Greenidge, historian and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019); and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016) talk about growing up together as sisters and how their work often overlaps.
“These are people who are basically pulled all over the world, and they have various antecedents that are a bit everywhere.” In an interview with Parul Sehgal at the 92nd Street Y, André Aciman, whose latest novel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), is a sequel to his 2007 novel, Call Me By Your Name, talks about how his cultural background has influenced the way his characters communicate and interact with one another.
“I think Jane Austen, in general, writes about young people and young love very accurately,” says Leo Suter, who costars with Theo James and Rose Williams in the PBS Masterpiece adaptation of Jane Austen’s final unfinished novel, Sanditon, written and executive produced by Andrew Davies. Originally titled The Brothers, the manuscript was left unfinished in 1817 with only the first eleven chapters written, and has since been adapted and completed in various versions.
“I have an obligation to human beings, my characters, so that’s all I care about.” In this PEN International interview, Yiyun Li speaks about the expectation as a Chinese American writer to be a spokesperson for a particular experience, and how she enjoys exploring the interior struggles of her characters. Li won the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her novel Where Reasons End (Random House, 2020).
