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Politics and Prose Bookstore owner Lissa Muscatine and head book buyer Mark Laframboise talk about their favorite fiction books of 2016, beginning with Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, 2016) by Adam Haslett, who was featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Upon moments like these, time never stops gnawing its little beaver teeth and the dialogue never stops even after we stop listening.” In this 2012 video, Peter Orner reads from his novel Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, 2011). His first essay collection, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (Catapult, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I want to be able to have some impact on the Nigerian youth, and I want to be able to go back home and do something inspiring..." Chigozie Obioma talks about the response to his debut novel, The Fishermen (Little, Brown, 2015), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
James Hannaham speaks about the importance of a good narrative and why people continue to read even when there's a spoiler to the plot. Hannaham was awarded the 36th annual PEN/Faulkner Award for his second novel, Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2015).
"This is my secret weapon: this large, red-brick building is the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan." Scott Ellsworth, author of The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph (Little, Brown, 2015), which was named the winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, gives a tour of his writing space at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“A lot of poems for me begin in the sense of feeling annihilated in some way or another.” Idra Novey discusses her poetic beginnings at the Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Poets Forum. Her debut novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I set out in this book to write beyond my experience. As Colum McCann says...'Write towards what you want to know.'" Sunil Yapa recounts wisdom he learned from his mentors, and describes the inspiration for his debut novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Little, Brown, 2016), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
One BookTuber offers his view on 2015's book lists from the New York Times to Publishers Weekly, Amazon to Goodreads. Paula Hawkins's debut novel, The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2015), James Hannaham's Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2015), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) are books that top the lists.
Rick Moody reads an excerpt from his new novel, Hotels of North America (Little, Brown, 2015), at a recording of WNYC's "Answer Songs" show, accompanied by artist Michael Arthur's real-time illustrations.
"Whether I was born this way or my personality was formed by circumstance, I don't think anyone would call me an easy person to deal with..." Photographer Sally Mann reads from her memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
