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At Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., Yaa Gyasi speaks about her debut novel, Homegoing (Knopf, 2016), with Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and how a visit to the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana inspired the book.
“High school changed my life. Suddenly, there was Latin and German, and Silas Marner and The Odyssey.” Cynthia Ozick talks about her childhood, family influences, and the inspiration behind her book, The Shawl (Knopf, 1989). Ozick’s new nonfiction book, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"One thing that I had always wanted for this book was that by the time you got to the end of it, you couldn't say that you didn't understand why black people in America are the way they are, or why they might feel the things that they feel—you get to see exactly what steps have led to the current state of racial tension in America." Read more about Yaa Gyasi in "First Fiction 2016" in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and hear her read from her debut novel, Homegoing (Knopf, 2016), on Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
"What it means / is, what it's showing is, there's this unseen / eye, on the inside. And she's marking it." Listen to Amit Majmudar, a radiologist and Ohio's first poet laureate, read the title poem from his new collection, Dothead (Knopf, 2016). This reading took place at the 2015 Neustadt Festival of International Literature and Culture hosted by the University of Oklahoma.
"I'm a graphomaniac!" Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk talks about his love of writing for the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club. His newest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind (Knopf, 2015), is longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.
"I totally understand the vulnerability that my voice makes people feel." In an interview with Maria Hinojosa, author Diane Rehm speaks about living with the voice-destroying illness spasmodic dysphonia. Rehm's memoir On My Own (Knopf, 2016) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Jhumpa Lahiri talks with Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's novels, about Ferrante, literature, translation, and writing at the Center for Jewish History. Lahiri, who is featured in the the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, has a new memoir, In Other Words (Knopf, 2016), which is translated from the Italian by Goldstein. For more from Lahiri and Goldstein, listen to the latest episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
David Shields and Caleb Powell, authors of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (Knopf, 2015), reignite the age-old debate about the lives of artists as they attempt to disturb preconceived divisions between reality and fiction, life and art.
"My name is Tiro. For thirty-six years I was the confidential secretary of the Roman statesman Cicero." So begins Imperium (Simon & Schuster, 2006), the first volume in Robert Harris's celebrated Cicero trilogy. Dictator (Knopf, 2016) is the final installment of the series.
"The snow was dancing like cotton wool in the light of the street lamps. Aimlessly, unable to decide whether it wanted to fall up or down..." The opening lines of Jo Nesbø's most recent novel, Blood on Snow (Knopf, 2015), translated from the Norwegian by Neil Smith, are read in the audio edition by Patti Smith.
