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In this animated video, Bill Gates recommends five books for summer reading, which include The Heart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) by Maylis de Kerangal, Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016) by J. D. Vance, and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harper, 2017) by Yuval Noah Harari.
“The Portuguese have a word for haunting desire, for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be experienced love: whoop-de-doo.” For the Hugo Literary Series, Téa Obreht, Eduardo C. Corral, and Quenton Baker share their poems and stories meditating on the theme of theft.
Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers (Riverhead Books, 2016), speaks about her first memorable piece of writing and her experiences as a young reader and writer.
Denis Johnson reads a selection of short stories to a captive audience as part of the Spring 2016 Barbara and David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series at Cornell University. Johnson died at the age of sixty-seven on May 25, 2017.
This animated book trailer captures the elements of thriller, mystery, and fable present in Australian author Fiona McFarlane’s debut novel, The Night Guest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). McFarlane received the 2017 International Dylan Thomas Prize for her story collection, The High Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
“And if you can’t keep secrets from your family, who can you keep secrets from?” In this video, Jonathan Safran Foer reads excerpts from his novel Here I Am (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) at Salon@615 in Nashville.
“This poem ‘Home’ is not only talking about ‘home,’ a physical place. It’s also talking about language as a home which I feel exiled from.” Safiya Sinclair, author of the debut collection Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads from “Home” and talks about the multiple languages and places that inhabit her poems.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads “damn right it’s betta than yours” from her collection, TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), and talks about the influences of music and language on her writing.
“In literature you get these magical moments when you can actually feel yourself to be somebody else...and those moments I think are incredibly important for the development of a society because they’re expansive moments.” Hisham Matar, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in autobiography for his debut memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016), talks about the role literature plays in creating social change.
“You read so many versions of girlhood or what it’s supposed to look like and it can feel very alienating and untrue.” At the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, author Emma Cline discusses her writing process and the inspiration for her debut novel, The Girls (Random House, 2016), with Ellen Sussman.
