Theater video tags: 2016

Mathias Svalina

Caption: 

“We were in love with the world / and then we weren’t...” Mathias Svalina reads an excerpt of his poem “From Thank You Terror” at the Silo City Reading Series with music by the band Cages and visual art by Mary Helena Clark. Svalina is the author of The Wine-Dark Sea (Sidebrow Books, 2016) and travels to cities in America by bicycle delivering personalized poems to subscribers of his Dream Delivery Service.

Genre: 

Megan Hunter and Max Porter

Caption: 

“To me, the world of novels often doesn’t feel real, and I was certainly quite aware of writing something kind of between poetry and prose.” Megan Hunter reads from her debut novel, The End We Start From (Grove Press, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and talks with Granta editorial director Max Porter about writing speculative fiction.

Genre: 

A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment

Caption: 

“This city is full / of stranger things than a man collecting foil.” This short film is an adaptation of a poem of the same title by Matthew Yeager, author of Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) and cocurator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series. Directed by Sean Logan, the film features a drum score by tabla player Marcus Wise.

Genre: 

Esmé Weijun Wang

Caption: 

“The way that I write fiction is to kind of go in and just wander around.” In this video, Granta magazine’s Josie Mitchell speaks to Esmé Weijun Wang about her debut novel, The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press, 2016), and her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, which won the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

Two Poems by Tarfia Faizullah

Caption: 

In this short film produced for Voluble, a Los Angeles Review of Books channel, Tarfia Faizullah reads two of her poems. Faizullah, author of the poetry collections Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), collaborated with emcee and producer Brooklyn Shanti and tabla player Robin Sukhadia to create this video.

Genre: 

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Caption: 

Poet and essayist Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib reads his poem “When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being a Chicago Bulls Fan” from his debut poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), at the Sheen Center in New York. His debut essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), uses music and culture as a lens to view the world.

Genre: 

José Eduardo Agualusa

Caption: 

“It’s a notebook, it’s not a collection of poems, it’s not exactly a novel, no fiction, what is this? Nobody knows.” In this video, Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa talks about being influenced by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Agualusa won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion (Vintage, 2016) with Daniel Hahn, who translated the book from the Portuguese. 

Genre: 

Pages

Subscribe to 2016