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In this video, Book Riot offers six recommendations for books that feature refugees including Girl at War (Random House, 2015) by Sara Nović, Inside Out and Back Again (Harper, 2011) by Thanhha Lai, and Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017) by Mohsin Hamid.
“Many stories with real urgency and momentum grow out of a simple request; someone says to someone else, ‘There's something I want you to do.’” Charles Baxter, author of the short story collection There’s Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon, 2015), delivers a lecture on dramatic structure and how to create urgency and momentum in stories for the Word Works series at Hugo House.
“For me, books are the things that tell you what you need to do in life and they’re also the things that help you make sense of your life.” Will Schwalbe, author of Books for Living (Knopf, 2016), speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about the importance of reading and the books that have taught him life lessons such as Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2015), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (Dial Press, 1956), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (Knopf, 1977).
Jon Boilard, whose first short story collection, Settright Road (Dzanc Books, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from his second novel, The Castaway Lounge (Dzanc Books, 2015), at the Why There Are Words reading series.
Joshua Mohr reads from his novel All This Life (Soft Skull Press, 2015) and talks about the need for artists and publishers to transgress against cultures of homogeneity. Mohr's debut memoir, Sirens (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ayelet Waldman talks about her family history, working in different styles of writing, and sharing a moving moment with an elderly reader in this video for the World Affairs Council. Waldman’s first memoir, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life (Knopf, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I thought, okay, a hundred pages, I’ll do the four seasons, twenty-five pages each section, that’s all I have to do.” Poet and novelist Jennifer Tseng, whose novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions, 2015), is longlisted for the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, reads a selection and talks about her writing inspiration and experience.
“During the spring and summer all the grasses come up, and that’s always the first thing I smell when I go up there [to South Dakota], and the first thing I miss when I come back...” Layli Long Soldier talks about the inspiration for her “Grass Poems” series and reads a selection of poems from her debut collection, WHEREAS, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017. Long Soldier is a 2016 Whiting Award winner in poetry.
“I’m making an argument with my body and the ground about our bodies and the ground.” At Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), discusses the implications of being a black poet who writes about flowers in a lecture entitled “A Book of Flowers.”
“I didn’t understand that I had to be ruthless. I didn’t understand that my job as a writer wasn’t to coddle my characters and create these fairy tales for them to live.” At Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Jesmyn Ward and Edwidge Danticat discuss writing about their homes and the power of place.
