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In this video, Iranian writer Yaghoub Yadali takes a quick tour of a Sriricha hot sauce factory in Irwindale, California, between stops on his reading tour for Rituals of Restlessness (Phoneme Media, 2016), translated by Sara Khalili from the Farsi. It is the debut book in Phoneme Media's City of Asylum series, in partnership with the Pittsburgh nonprofit City of Asylum, which provides sanctuary for exiled writers.
"The idea of The Removals being both a physical and a spiritual or psychological removal really haunted me and intrigued me." Writer and director Nicholas Rombes speaks about an old manuscript by a Puritan woman from the 1680s, which inspired his new film, The Removals, the second feature film produced by Two Dollar Radio. Rombes is the author of the novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio, 2014).
Curtis Sittenfeld speaks with PBS NewHour's Jeffrey Brown about her latest novel, Eligible (Random House, 2016), a retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice set in twenty-first-century Cincinnati. Sittenfeld is a participant of the Austen Project, in which six contemporary authors have been asked to reimagine Austen's six complete works.
Yuri Herrera reads from his debut novel, Kingdom Cons (Faber & Faber, 2012), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, at a 2012 Litquake event at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Herrera's second novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World (And Other Stories, 2015), also translated by Dillman, is the winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in fiction.
"I’m so damned literary / and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of / nothing..." Hilary Kaplan reads Frank O'Hara's "Poem en Forme de Saw" from Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Publishers. Angélica Freitas's debut collection, Rilke Shake (Phoneme Media, 2015), translated from the Portuguese by Kaplan, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in poetry.
“A cook marries ingredients much the way a poet marries words. This is a human experience.” In Cooking With the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare (Tupelo Press, 2016), poet Stephen Massimilla and chef Myra Kornfeld collaborate on an anthology of culinary poems and recipes. The book explores the connection between cooking and writing, and includes works by luminaries such as Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Zora Neale Hurston, Seamus Heaney, and Jane Hirshfield.
"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.
"Outside, a soldier spits out / his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones / fallen from the sky. May / all your Christmases be white / as the traffic guard unstraps his holster." Ocean Vuong shares poems from his debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and speaks about the oral tradition of his family and his personal ties to the Vietnam War for a series on PBS NewsHour.
"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.
"What it means / is, what it's showing is, there's this unseen / eye, on the inside. And she's marking it." Listen to Amit Majmudar, a radiologist and Ohio's first poet laureate, read the title poem from his new collection, Dothead (Knopf, 2016). This reading took place at the 2015 Neustadt Festival of International Literature and Culture hosted by the University of Oklahoma.
