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"I want to be able to have some impact on the Nigerian youth, and I want to be able to go back home and do something inspiring..." Chigozie Obioma talks about the response to his debut novel, The Fishermen (Little, Brown, 2015), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
"I'm telling the story of my family and my life...just telling the point of view of children in a small village near Homs, and I like the reader to make his own judgment on everything." Syrian-French cartoonist and director Riad Sattouf talks about his book The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984: A Graphic Memoir (Metropolitan Books, 2015), translated from the French by Sam Taylor, which won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for graphic novel/comics.
"Dive into the words—here lies / fashion, here lies grace." E. Kristin Anderson reads from her chapbook Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I Wrote to Prince in the Middle of the Night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), a collection of poems penned to, and inspired by, the late Prince.
"I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces." Viet Thanh Nguyen reads from his debut novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), for which he was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
"In the hermetic almost dark / under the fluorescent dizz / I found her broken nerves..." In this video, Peter Balakian gives a reading at the Colgate Writers' Conference in 2009. Balakian is the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection Ozone Journal (University of Chicago, 2015).
Lauren Redniss gives a TEDx Talk about the process of trial, error, and transforming mistakes that went into the creation of her second book, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books, 2010). Redniss was awarded the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for her latest book, Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House, 2015).
James Hannaham speaks about the importance of a good narrative and why people continue to read even when there's a spoiler to the plot. Hannaham was awarded the 36th annual PEN/Faulkner Award for his second novel, Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2015).
This short film is based on Jory John's humor piece "I'm an Expert Haggler at Garage Sales" published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency in 2015. Directed by David Jude Harris, the film stars Matt Ingebretson and Diane Sellers.
"I suppose that's exactly the problem—I wasn't raised to know any better." Novelist and poet Paul Beatty reads from his novel The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Beatty is also a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
"I didn't set out to write a book about Mary Shelley." Author Charlotte Gordon discusses her book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015), which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.
