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“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.
“‘There’s a war,’ she told them. ‘People are fighting, bad things are happening.’” Hala Alyan, who is featured in “First Fiction 2017” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her debut novel, Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), at Politics and Prose Bookstore.
“Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and only change into yoga clothes for yoga, which, today, I will actually attend.” Maria Semple reads from and discusses her novel Today Will Be Different (Little, Brown, 2016).
“Something is happening. Whether it is all in my head remains to be seen.” Ayelet Waldman reads from her book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life (Knopf, 2017) at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C.
“The earth was running out of resources, global warming was beginning to be recognized as science fact and not science fiction, and if man was to evolve to play a part in things...we'd have to seed life elsewhere—on Mars, to begin with.” At Politics and Prose Bookstore, T. C. Boyle reads from his latest novel, The Terranauts (Ecco, 2016).
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.
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.
"Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality." James Wood, literary critic for the New Yorker and a professor of practice at Harvard University, reads from The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of essays from the Mandel Lectures in Humanities, a book series published by Brandeis University Press.
"I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces." Viet Thanh Nguyen reads from his debut novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), for which he was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
"I suppose that's exactly the problem—I wasn't raised to know any better." Novelist and poet Paul Beatty reads from his novel The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Beatty is also a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
