Jump to navigation Skip to content
“When a woman you love hits you / on the head with a book / you love, is that love?” At the New School, Brenda Shaughnessy reads from her poetry collection So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) for a Cave Canem event with poet Jamaal May.
Tyehimba Jess reads his poem “Another Man Done” for the Migration Series Poetry Suite, a collection of poems commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in response to the exhibition “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North.” Jess won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection Olio (Wave Books, 2016).
“I’ve always been quite preoccupied with identity—personal identity—and also how the individual is constructed or constituted by larger social forces...” Hari Kunzru, author most recently of White Tears (Knopf, 2017), talks about his thematic interests and a book project on privacy and surveillance which he worked on during his fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
“I was interested in the transmission of artistic practice—art, music, ideology, politics—from West to East and back again, and how that gets reflected in the creation of art.” Madeleine Thien talks about the premise and themes of her third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta Books, 2016), which is longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Morgan Parker reads a selection of poems including “Heaven Be a Xanax,” “Hottentot Venus,” and “Slouching Toward Beyoncé” from her second poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), with musical accompaniment by David Cieri. Parker’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I take inspiration from the fact that however difficult our moment is today, it’s not as difficult as it has been in the past.” Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks with Bonnie Boswell about the current political climate and connections between his own personal history and his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015). Nguyen’s first story collection, The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In Neruda, a film directed by Pablo Larraín, an inspector hunts down Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who becomes a fugitive in his home country for joining the Communist Party. Part fact, part fiction, the film stars Gael García Bernal and Luis Gnecco.
“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).
“The earth was running out of resources, global warming was beginning to be recognized as science fact and not science fiction, and if man was to evolve to play a part in things...we'd have to seed life elsewhere—on Mars, to begin with.” At Politics and Prose Bookstore, T. C. Boyle reads from his latest novel, The Terranauts (Ecco, 2016).
"Dinky planet on a skateboard of dynamite / Oh, what to do..." Juan Felipe Herrera, who has been appointed a second term as poet laureate of the United States, speaks about meeting young poets and reads from his most recent collection, Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights Publishers, 2015), at the 2016 AWP conference and book fair in Los Angeles.
