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“I can make worlds. That’s literally my job, is to make worlds,” says Awkaeke Emezi in this American Writers Museum video. “Instead of searching for other people to give me a place to belong, I just bent one into existence myself.” Emezi’s latest novel, The Death of Vivek Oji (Riverhead Books, 2020), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“What I was interested in was the idea of this character committing to whiteness as this act, and the idea that race can be performed but at the same time it has these real implications in your life.” In this Politics and Prose virtual event, Brit Bennett speaks about the topics of duality, passing, and family in her latest novel, The Vanishing Half (Riverhead Books, 2020), with New York Times Magazine editor Jazmine Hughes.
“I think for art you do kind of have to wait for the inspiration to strike. You have to let all these feelings sort of simmer and build up inside you.” C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), talks about her writing process and how the characters of her novel pushed her to write their stories in this interview for Late Night With Seth Meyers.
“One of the reasons why I wrote Deacon King Kong is because I wanted to show a world where people actually got along.” In this video, James McBride, whose novel Deacon King Kong (Riverhead Books, 2020) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the inspiration for the novel and shows CBS This Morning host Jeff Glor around the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up.
Nick Hornby’s first novel, High Fidelity (Riverhead Books, 1995), whose 2000 film adaptation starred John Cusack and moved the story from London to Chicago, has been adapted into a Hulu television show. The series stars Zoë Kravitz as the neurotic owner of a local record store in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood who revisits former romantic partners after a recent breakup.
“When I was thinking about Red at the Bone, one thing I knew I wanted to talk about was class—economic class—especially in the Black community, and history.” Jacqueline Woodson talks about her new novel, Red at the Bone (Riverhead Books, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and reads the poem from her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014) that she calls “the seed” of the novel.
Washington Post book critic Ron Charles takes a humorous look at Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread (Riverhead Books, 2019), for his Totally Hip Video Book Review series. Oyeyemi answers questions about her new novel in a recent installment of our online series Ten Questions.
“In a lot of African storytelling, unlike storytelling in the West, it’s the trickster who is telling the story, so you already know you can’t quite believe it.” On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Marlon James speaks about the influences behind his new novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead Books, 2019), the first title of his Dark Star Trilogy, ranging from the television series The Affair and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. A profile of James by Kima Jones appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I became a writer not because I was seeking community but rather because I thought it would be something I could do alone and hidden in the privacy of my own room,” says Sigrid Nunez in her acceptance speech for the 2018 National Book Award in fiction, which she won for her seventh novel, The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018). “How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible: to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time.”
“I have always been interested in borders, physical and metaphysical borders, frontiers that we create...” Anna Badkhen speaks with Sarah Beth Childers at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa about the inspiration for her latest book, Fisherman Blues: A West African Community at Sea (Riverhead, 2018), and the blending of mythology and history. Badkhen was awarded the second Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship.
