"I imagined that because everyone was telling me I was so very bright, there must be something there for me. But my skin was black," says Guyanese author, teacher, and diplomat E. R. Braithwaite, whose five nonfiction books and two novels, including To Sir, With Love (1959), are available as e-books from Open Road Integrated Media.

This video explores the various compelling reasons why—from professional etiquette concerns to hiding one’s tarnished identity—some notable authors chose to write under pseudonyms.

“Hubert Selby was the underdog and the voice for the...downtrodden, and was marginalized because he spoke up for the little guy,” says Henry Rollins. “But you see the great humanity and the warmth and richness that he brought to things.” The author of nine novels who died in 2004 is celebrated by two of his greatest champions, Rollins and Amiri Baraka, in this video from Open Road Media.

The author of thirteen books of essays, short stories, and nonfiction—winner of the National Book Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other honors—talks about the landscape of his home in western Oregon and the art of storytelling in this video from Open Road Media.

Avery Corman, Michael Chabon, Patricia Bosworth, and others reflect on what fatherhood means to them in this video from Open Road Media. 

"Most fiction is a sort of collaboration between experience and imagination," explains Steve Erickson, the author of several novels, including Tours of the Black Clock, The Sea Came in at Midnight, and Zeroville, in this video from Open Road Media. "At some point, a novel starts making its own choices." 

May is Short Story Month, and in this video from Open Road Media, acclaimed short story writers such as James Jones, Susan Minot, Peter Cameron, David Corbett, Nicola Barker, Bradford Morrow, and Robert McCammon discuss the joys and challenges of the short form.

The third installment of Akashic's Drug Chronicles series, The Heroin Chronicles, edited by Jerry Stahl, includes stories by Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch, Nathan Larson, Ava Stander, and many others. In this video from Open Road Media, Stahl talks about William Burroughs, the difference between an alcoholic and a junkie, and how he selected the pieces for the anthology.

Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, N. K. Jemisin, Virginia Hamilton, and David Halberstam discuss the legacy and contributions of African American writers to the Western canon in this video from Open Road Media.

"I'm not a linear thinker," says Ishmael Reed in this video from Open Road Media. "That's one of the reasons I'm able to make different associations that people wouldn't ordinarily make." The author of ten novels, including Mumbo Jumbo (1972), as well as plays, essays, and poems, Reed talks about his unique style of telling stories, which draw upon different languages, religions, and other cultural influences.