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“Even if what you’re writing seems boring to you...you’re preparing yourself for the moment when life or something else broadsides you and you need to write.” John Freeman, editor of the essay anthology Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (Penguin Books, 2017), shares writing advice and what his favorite authors have in common.
“I hear words spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives.” At a 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017), which details her experience as an interpreter for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.
“If there are fewer stars now / than when I was a child, / I can’t say / which are missing, / who was the last to see them.” Maggie Smith’s poem “Small Shoes” is adapted into a short film by director Kate Dolan for Motionpoems. Smith is the author of the poetry collection Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), the title poem of which went viral on social media after it was first published online in the literary journal Waxwing.
“There are so many women who are not married, and don’t have children, out there; there are so many of us but it’s still a bit provocative to write about.” In this interview for BBC News, Dorthe Nors talks about Jane Austen, writing about women, and her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Graywolf Press, 2018), with Helena Kelly, author of the biography Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (Knopf, 2017).
“Frank grew crows for hands / it was a difficult childhood...” In this video, CAConrad reads a series of poems from The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010) for a 2013 reading at the Machine Project in Los Angeles. CAConrad’s poetry collection While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry.
Bill Gates shares his annual summer reading list, which includes Walter Isaacson’s biography Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 2017) and George Saunders’s novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017).
“I think something like garage or grime or rap, hip-hop, appeals to me because they’re very metrical, rhyme-based forms.” Zambian British poet Kayo Chingonyi talks about his path to poetry, his interests and influences, and internationalism and Anglophone literature for Writers’ Centre Norwich. Chingonyi won the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut poetry collection, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017).
“It sings, it bubbles…it would enrich anybody’s life to read it.” Tim Martin and the panel of judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize discuss and praise this year’s winner, Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk is the first Polish writer to win the Man Booker International Prize.
“Seed” is a digital story written by Joanna Walsh and illustrated by Charlotte Hicks, and published by Visual Editions. Created by Google Creative Lab, the story is available for free and “crafted to live inside mobile technology,” designed so that readers can navigate through multiple unique narratives.
Glenn Close reads “Old Wives’ Tales on Which I Was Fed” from Jenny Xie’s debut collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), which won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Walt Whitman Award. Eye Level is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
