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“I had wanted to write a book about freedom,” reads Maggie Nelson from her latest essay collection, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021), in this 2021 virtual reading and conversation with author Hari Kunzru for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
“What does it mean when we say books unite us? It means that books can be the tethers, that books can connect human beings.” In this video, Jason Reynolds, honorary chair of Banned Books Week 2021, talks about the importance of reading a range of narratives and stories that make up this “tapestry of life” and the danger of censoring that knowledge. “To censor a book is to damage the framework in which we live,” says Reynolds.
In this virtual event for the Vocarium reading series sponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room, CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), and Diane Seuss, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), read from their work following an introduction by poet Ariana Reines.
“These times are really ripe for different opportunities and taking different approaches to things because everyone’s sort of making it up as they go along.” In this BLDRfly video, Wisteria Bristol, Peter Jones, and Sofia Miranda, co-owners of Trident Booksellers & Café in Boulder, Colorado, speak about shifting the store to an employee-owned model during the pandemic and how that has affected their connection to the community. For more, read “From Booksellers to Owners” by Lynn Rosen in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this virtual reading and conversation examining the multitude of identities, authors Usha Akella, Manuel Muñoz, and Suzi Q. Smith read their work and speak with Aruni Kashyap for the 2021 Jaipur Literature Festival Colorado. Akella, cofounder of the Matwaala collective, is featured in “Building Solidarity Through Poetry” by Swati Khurana in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I think the books that I wish I’d written are all super personal books where the person manages to metabolize their personal experience into something more universal,” says Elif Batuman in this interview for The Graham Norton Book Club podcast about first books read, books to be jealous of, and books to recommend. A Q&A with Batuman by Porochista Khakpour is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“My mother thought that if she taught me to read, I would become interested to read my books and leave her alone,” says Jamaica Kincaid about her experience reading as a child and how it influenced her as a writer in this interview from the 2021 Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
Drive My Car is a film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and starring Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura. The film, which won best screenplay at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and the 2022 Oscar for best international feature film, follows the relationship between a widowed theater actor-director and a young woman hired to be his chauffeur.
In this virtual discussion, poet, novelist, and playwright Fred D’Aguiar speaks with Daljit Nagra, chair of the Royal Society of Literature, about their shared experience of breaking ground in the poetry landscape and their favorite poets, as well as D’Aguiar’s book Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 (Harper, 2021).
“Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about my mom losing her hair, or my mom losing weight, I was thinking about us in Korea eating patbingsu,” says Michelle Zauner in this CBS Sunday Morning interview about her best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart (Knopf, 2021), and finding comfort in the Korean-owned supermarket chain after losing her mother to cancer.
