Jump to navigation Skip to content
“Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address.” In this video, Rudy Francisco reads his poem “Complainers” from his debut poetry collection, Helium (Button Poetry, 2017), on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“I found this liberation from the limitation…” In this Asia Society video, Xiaolu Guo explains why writing in English, her second language, is so freeing. Guo is the winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography for her memoir, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove Press, 2017).
This Motionpoems film, presented by Button Poetry, is an adaptation of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s poem “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” directed by Seyi Peter-Thomas and produced by Station Film, in partnership with Cave Canem. Charleston is the author of the poetry collection, Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017).
“The whole engine to my writing is always to try and understand what it feels like to be another person…” Elizabeth Strout, author of Anything Is Possible (Random House, 2017), talks to Mary Laura Philpott of A Word on Words about her attempt at stand-up comedy and what inspires her to write.
Stephanie Powell Watts talks to Mary Laura Philpott of A Word on Words about how her debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us (Ecco, 2017), is just like The Great Gatsby except totally different, and why honest criticism is necessary for a writer.
Weike Wang speaks with Mary Laura Philpott of A Word on Words about her debut novel, Chemistry (Knopf, 2017), and why her main character doesn’t have a name. Wang is a 2017 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction.
Laurent Binet talks about his two novels, HHhH (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) and The Seventh Function of Language (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), both translated from the French by Sam Taylor, as well as the topics of semiotics and meta-narrative writing in this video for Vintage Books. The Seventh Function of Language is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
At Shakespeare and Company in Paris, Argentinian writer Ariana Harwicz talks about her debut novel, Die, My Love (Charco Press, 2017), with Carolina Orloff, who cotranslated the book from the Spanish with Sarah Moses. The novel is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
“Six months remain until you will be born and anything at all could happen to you in that time...” Karl Ove Knausgaard reads from his book Autumn (Penguin Press, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the September/October 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“It was like the story of your relations with others...was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.” Elif Batuman reads from her debut novel, The Idiot (Penguin Press, 2017), a semifinalist for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.
